Aurelie (Wir Sind Helden)

The one question that always gets asked at this time of year - and this year in particular: "aren't you excited to be finished?" Funnily enough, the answer is no: I'm not jumping up and down for the sheer joy of it all. I just shrug my shoulders and enjoy having handed in my last paper and taken my last exam. Now, of course, the path is clear to a complete lack of productivity over the coming week. I shall have to stave off the inactivity as much as possible since next week will require me to power up once again.

Graduation fast approaches, which means getting final grades off to my graduate programme and picking up my cap and gown. It also means that my parents will be heading into town next weekend. Provided the time allows, this will mean showing the folks the campus they left behind all those decades ago. As far as the original 4 of us go, all of us have gone to WFU for our undergraduate studies. Really, we didn't mean for it to turn out that way, but it's always amusing to other people.

Unlike some of my friends, leaving Wake isn't at all what phases me in the slightest. It doesn't bother me to leave, because at this point, my three years on campus (with 1 semester in DC and another in London) are enough for me: I'm ready to go somewhere new. Granted, London isn't as "new" as it could be seeing as I'm going back, but as it is most emphatically not Winston, the change is quite welcome. Honestly, the fact that strikes me the most now is that in four months I'll be there for at least a year. Of course, at this end of things, four months sounds short and yet can't go by quickly enough, while a year sounds almost inordinately long and I'd be content to have it drag out before me like a desert highway. Every time that my friends and I discuss our plans for work and graduate school, they laugh and insist that I'll never come back once I touch ground over in the UK again. I suppose, though, of us all, if anyone would leave and never come back except to visit the family, it'd be me. It still amuses me that they're all so sure. I think I'm going to enjoy some of my inordinate leisure time, now. Perhaps go ponder the many mysteries of the universe whilst pounding away on the treadmill.