you may now call me master

i'm done.

two years of hard work and giving up so many things that i love to do in order to focus on school ... weekends spent indoors studying, missed parties, a sabbatical from my mens group, lost connections with friends, savings account drain ... and on. and on.

people ask me how i feel about it and if i'm having some kind of graduation party. i haven't set up any kind of celebration. i feel proud of myself for staying with the program and creating the discipline i needed to finish at the top of my class. but i haven't looked at it as something to create a huge hubbub about.

there is one thing that i will reserve the right to brag about here in my blog ... my grades. in many ways, grades don't really matter so much in grad school ... you either get a degree or you don't. there's a part of me that wants to be modest about that, and i will be in my day to day life, but here in the semi-private forum, i'll toot my own horn for a second and share that i am graduating with a 4.0 gpa. if i hadn't worked my ass off for that grade, i wouldn't care so much ... but i did. and that feels good.

it's important to me b/c i wanted to know that i could apply myself and achieve something that i wasn't sure i could. my undergrad grades are decent, but i was very distracted in undergrad with more time spent in bands and the theater than on school.

so there's a lot of other stuff going on .. new projects and commitments, dating, looking for a dream job ... but that will all have to wait. i'm still catching up with the ever-constant list of "things that have to get done." i'm going camping this weekend and will use that as a re-charge time. i'm going to write some vision statements around some various projects i'm working on and spend some time meditating and getting clear on how i want to use my time and energy.

for now ... you can call me master.

[the stupid thing is that, when i was a kid, the cards that came in the mail were always addressed to: Master "jblog". I'm not sure when I lost that title, but it sure was a hell of a lot of work to get it back again.

And don't worry, even though I'm not a "doctor", I'm good at pretending. "oh nurse!"