The Academic Theme of the Rest of Your Life

Happy Birdbath birthday, dear flock! The way we’ve been hyping up our triumphant return, it feels like I should be addressing you from behind my standing desk in my padded office at our newly remodeled New York City highrise publication headquarters, but in reality I’m perched on a window stool at Herkimer Coffee in Phinney Ridge, picking at a jam biscuit and doing my best to avoid getting distracted each time someone new walks in. It’s so much better. 

I’ve been spending the past week getting acclimated to this view, which boasts a near-270-degree view of what will be my neighborhood for at least the next year. Not only is this the first genuinely new environment I’ve found myself inhabiting that doesn’t have a fixed time limit in over four years, it’s also the first time since I was five years old that, come autumn, the theme of this issue doesn’t carry a literal meaning for me. It’s weird, and I don’t need to rehash the hundreds upon seemingly thousands of conversations I’ve had with peers (probably some of you reading this) that essentially boiled down to, “Wow, everything in my life that had been planned out for me since I was a child has now passed,” but tackling a Back to School theme as a recent graduate inevitably demands some metatextual self-reflection.

But, famously, one never stops learning – at least so you’re told in school. So I guess the world’s my classroom now, or something. What’s the academic theme of the rest of your life? I got a cat, moved in with my girlfriend in a brand new city, got a job at a doughnut shop, and now my days are spent happy, but full of questions about how to anchor myself to everything I hold dear about my old life while exploring an exciting new phase that demands a commitment to embracing new-ness. How do I balance my love for and commitment to my band back in Walla Walla with a demanding work schedule that pays my rent and keeps my cat fed? How do I nourish emerging friendships without neglecting the most important people in my life, who I no longer have the luxury of living within walking distance of? Questions that I know will become increasingly less taxing as I settle further into this new chapter – but which serve as small, necessary reminders that the end of my time in the, uh… education industrial complex… will only bring new, more personal, more compassionate, and ever stranger forms of learning.

And ultimately that nothing ever changes, even as everything does, because change is just growth, and growth needs a permanent foundation.

If I had to choose an academic theme for the rest of my life, it would probably sound something like that, just more… you know, concise and eloquent.

Here’s to a great second year, Birdbath readers and contributors. I can’t wait to watch you all grow.

With love.