"...and I marvel at how this moment creates that miracle."

I need to go back to reading about genocide in Rwanda and then go to bed so I can bang out hundreds of things tomorrow, but a few thoughts first.

Exactly a year ago right now my first visit to Oxford was coming to an end. While I could never have predicted then where I would be now, I can honestly say that visit is pretty much the reason I am here. At the time I was toying with calling it "life-changing," but that phrase is so cliche...everything I do changes my life, you know? I apparently ate a shit tone of junk food this semester and it's changed my life by turning me into a fat lump. So the term is flawed. But if I hadn't visited Jamie - and moreover, if I hadn't visited her then, over Toussaint - many significant things would have been different. I would not have learned several important (and not necessarily great) truths about the inner workings of my mind. I would not have seen Jamie in full 20s attire.

And I would not be in Madison right now. I think eventually I was bound to come to graduate school...it's like old people and Florida, it just pulls you in if you've got the slightest desire to go there. Or for me it would have been. But because I went to Oxford and remembered how good I felt when I was engaged in my love affair with literature back in Battelle (and admittedly fell in love with Oxford as well), I snuck my applications in just in time, was accepted, and decided on Wisconsin. And while the sight of my to-do list for tomorrow almost makes me question whether or not this is a good thing, mostly I'm sure it was.

So that's what it comes down to. Despite two decades of voracious reading, many supportive and wonderful educators, a natural inability to be interested in anything but books and essays about them, and my inexplicable attraction to the letters "PhD," the fact is that if, about oh, 368 days ago, I hadn't been sprinting through a cow pasture in rural France with sweat flying off me and my luggage clutched desperately to my chest, trying to make my flight to Stansted, I would not be a grad student.

Is this moment a miracle? No. But it will be if I someday get those letters.