Yesterday, I found out that my academic career is over, ended and shutdown. Or rather concluded. It is a very strange feeling. When I was walking around back and forth between the library and my apartment around 5PM, I felt like I had lost 145 pounds. Like a massive weight that was hanging around my neck for the past five years had suddenly fallen off, and I hadn't gotten used to my new found mobility.

In fact, the whole atmosphere at the time was perversly disjointed. After I typed the last bit of my Japanese paper in my second home, and after MSWORD crashed on me, and after I nearly soiled my pants trying to find the backup file, I went outside. Apparently it had rained, hard. All of the flowers in front of the library had been decapatated, with the petals and dirt sprawled out all over the pavement. A tree had also been struck by lightning or blown over near the north entrance of the library. I felt like a pebble rattling around in one of those machines that makes smooth stones... the very last pebble left clanking around in there making a bunch of noise.

I guess what I was feeling was disbelief. Some how I, amidst people frowning and scowling at me when I mentioned how many credits I was taking, survived this whole thing. So perhaps it was slightly unbeliveable, or perhaps I had convinced myself that what I was doing was impossible. I don't know.

Today, I was kind of empty feeling. It was as if I've been trained for years to to do one kind of repetitive labor, and I'm still doing it after all my tools have been taken away, or perhaps I was just doing a kata the entire time. Which is kind of what I've been thinking about recently, what are all of those papers that I've written going to amount? There weren't any massive breakthroughs, was I just regurgitating half digested variations of what was fed to me? Would I be able to produce some kind of eye opening revelations like XYZ-san in AP English??! Or will I still be the babbling disconnnected one who is attached to some foreign culture which he is not yet a part of, like me in Ms. ABC's English class. What the hell am I going to do with a degree in Japanese, where is my future going to lead me, who can I depend on, why am I not dating anyone, why haven't I stayed in contact with my friends why what how who help me.