Ack.

I decided to start graduate school this fall. The more accurate way to put that is that I thought I might want to go to grad school, and then my family thought it was a great idea and got really enthusiastic about it, and that kind of rubbed off on me, so now I'm going. Tonight was orientation at the university and it pretty much freaked me out. I'm simultaneously excited and terrified - remembering why I've always liked school but also totally afraid that with work, husband, kid, family, friends and my need for an inordinate amount of sleep, I may not be able to hack it.

I'll figure it out. I'll do okay. (I say this not to convince you, but to convince myself.) But it's been quite awhile since I had to worry about a syllabus or reading chapters and chapters and chapters of dry textbooks at a time. Of course, I was one of the weirdos in college who actually did ALL of the reading for every class, without fail, and then made color-coded notes. But school was pretty much my only major or difficult responsibility then, and things are different now. So I'm kind of freaking out.

In a related note, university libraries have come a long way since I graduated from Purdue in 2000. Then and there, you could only look up library materials using a computer IN a library, and then the book/journal/whatever that you wanted may not actually even be in the library you were in, but rather in any of the dozen or so other libraries on campus. Thus, you could spend entire weekend days running around campus, trying to get all the resources you wanted for a paper. Oh yeah, and then you had to pay four cents a page (using your Copy Card) to photocopy journal articles. Now apparently you just go to the library website, look up what you want, put in your student ID number and get online access to journal articles. If they don't have the book you want, but another library does, they'll just get it for you and tell you when it's in. Do you know how much of my life I wasted going in and out of campus libraries? I felt old when I learned about the library at orientation this evening. ("Back in my day, we had to actually walk across campus to the library and then PAY to photocopy pages!")

I'm still freaking out. I'll be okay.