taste of freedom

I began university exactly twelve years ago this month, an excited teenager in a foreign city, looking perhaps more for adventure than intellectual stimulation. Over the past 12 years, I have held a variety of odd jobs, moved flat and country more times than I can remember, and visited libraries around the globe. I have done four degrees in four countries. To be sure, I took some years off in between degrees along the way, but generally with the intention of saving money to continue. Then, yesterday, I went my current university’s student record office, and I handed in my doctoral thesis. I then went home, stared at the four walls around me, and wondered what to do. It was then it all sunk in: for the first time in 12 years I don’t HAVE to come home and do anything! I have worked to support myself throughout my studies, which has meant, especially in recent years, that the studying always got done at night time, after I got back from the office and ate dinner. I tried to imagine what “normal” people do with their time after work. I know what most of my colleagues do: they take cocaine, go to the pub and frequently end up screwing each other in unfortunate places. Or at least so they tell me every Monday morning. But then no one exactly holds up city bankers as role models of constructive use of free time. I am told other people watch TV. There is one in the corner of the flat, but when I walk over to it, I realise I don’t know how to turn it on. So I sit down on the sofa and open a book, a nice, delicious, uninformative novel. What an incredible sense of freedom!