This Saturday I will be graduating with my BA in English from college. Wait, it's been four years already? Oh, okay, because I feel like I posted a journal on DA as a freshman not too long ago. Ah, time flies!

Sentimentalities aside, I am completely ready to graduate. I've reached the point (with many of my peers) where I'm no longer challenged by my work, making much of what I do academically feel like busywork. In that regard, I hear that my graduate school (University of Chicago) is incredibly difficult, and I'm thrilled about that. I need a run for my money, and a year to get out of my rural Pennsylvania home town and go live in a big city. Which, speaking of money, is going to be horribly expensive. Ah, you only live once, I suppose. This time next year, I'll be completing my MA degree, and then I'll be working for a little while before I head off to a PhD program in literary and cultural studies. I can't keep hanging out in my college's English department hall sipping tea and toting around beaten copies of Jonson forever

Looking back, I'm very glad that my calling to humanities professor-ship trumped my desire to go into the sciences. Though I descend from a family of scientists (shouldn't my love for science be hereditary?) I was consistently unhappy working in a laboratory. And I've been fortunate enough to incorporate science, particularly medicine, into my literary studies. I'm planning on working with crime, punishment, anatomy and violence in early modern drama as means to conceptualize the significance of the physical body as well as intellectual/mental experience, and medicine is a large (cultural) part of how people understand what their bodies are. Yeah It makes more sense in my skull than it does typed out on a screen.

Perhaps the reason I'm so drawn to art is that I, and all other artists, can make cross-disciplinary connections like that. I may not be a biologist, but through art (whether literary or visual) I can grasp, explore, experience anatomy (Wanna be literary? Go re-read that sentence for sexual overtones. ) And I'm certain that there are scientist artists who relate to literature through artwork. Despite my literary tendencies, Albine and Dalton's tale is a direct result of my academic interest in the history of medicine; despite someone else's career path as a chemist, they might write characters who have been heavily inspired by Shakespeare, Austen or Woolf (how about Middleton, Marlowe, Webster, anyone? )

Ah, yes, it's been a grand four years. And I'm glad to, in part, have shared some of my personal growth and academic explorations through my artwork, however sparse in the past months.

Cheers,
APP