The Grad School Time Bubble

I loved reading the Harry Potter books when I was a kid. So, I don't know why it came as a surprise to me that I am loving the fantasy fiction world.

Two summers ago when I was driving to Canada and back, I decided that I needed a good long series of books to listen to on my lone journey across the vast western United States. I have crossed paths with a number of nerdy friends in my life, and it seemed as if each had told me to read this series called ... something with time in the title. The circle of time? Or something like that. Oh yeah, the Wheel of Time. I had never even had desire to read them because there are 14 books and they have cover art that looks like this:

and they range from 650 to 1000 pages each. You can see why it was a really hard sell for all my nerds. I was desperate with a summer of more than 60 hours of driving a head of me, I needed something to sustain the trek with me. So, I gave bought the first book and committed myself to probably the longest relationship of my life (if you don't count the characters on Grey's Anatomy).

Now, a year and a half later I have finished the whole series plus a few others. Abashedly, I will list them below:

Wheel of Time series 1-14 (462 hours)
Ruby Red series 1-3 by Kerstin Gier (31 hours)
The Lunar Chronicles 1-3 by Marissa Meyer (44 hours *Not including the latest release this week, I haven't listened to)
Dragonlance Chronicles 1-3 by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman (52 Hours)
Mistborn Series 1-5 by Brandon Sanderson (105 hours)
Elantris by Brandon Sanderson (27 hours)
Starlight Archive series 1-2 by Brandon Sanderson (94 hours)
The Belgariad series by David Eddings (10 hours **I've only listened to the first one)
______________________Grand total = 825 _________________

In my defense, I listen to them at 1.5x speed so I only literally listened to 550 hours. And over an 18 month period is only 30 hours a month. I feel like this admission is on the verge of impressive but leaning more toward embarrassing.

All of this is a long segway into a perfect analogy I discovered today.

So, in the Mistborn books, there are these people who are born with the ability to transform the metals inside their bodies in order to do super human things. They call it burning a metal. One of the metals that can be burned is called Cadmium, which would produce a time bubble around the person burning the metal. Inside the bubble, time would appear to be moving normally but time has slowed so those outside the bubble are moving so fast it's a blur.

I have decided that grad school is like a time bubble. While you're in it life is this weird slow motion but still normal life and everyone in your life is outside the bubble just moving at these warp speeds achieving all these amazing things.

Because being in college for 10 years really messes with a person's psyche. Living on ramen, ddp, doing homework, and never knowing what your schedule will be semester to semester does not lend to feeling like an adult.

My hope is that when I get done with school and get an adult job, the time bubble will go away and maybe I'll even end up at my dream job.