Precipitous

Been packing and driving all day, so this one should be brief.  I hope.

Anyway, amidst suitcases and sixteen-wheelers, I've come up with the perfect answer for when people ask me what I plan to do after graduation.

So they'll ask, "Why hello, Emily - what are your plans after graduation?"

And I'll respond with a winning smile, "Well you see, I haven't the foggiest."  Which is a fun little phrase meaning I don't know, but with a fresh and interesting spin.  Then, depending on who I am talking to, I will either (a) go on at length about how I've been very busy and important setting up an ERP lab, conducting research, etc., etc., (b) say that I would like a break from academia for a year or so to 'discover myself', or (c) laugh/cry hysterically.  Or (d) all of the above.

Then I will make a rueful little comment about how many graduates experience the lemming-like sensation that they are sprinting off of a cliff. 

Okay, I looked it up, and lemmings - the real, live, Arctic rodents (cute little guys.  maybe.) - don't actually have collective suicidal urges.

But the image is a colorful one, one which hopefully will further distract my audience and move them along to other, pleasanter topics.  Like rodentia.  Or suicide. 

Seriously though, isn't it strange that probably 90% of people my age have been set since age five or something ridiculous on this track that culminates with an undergraduate diploma?  And now I'm here...and it sort of does feel like treading on thin air.  I suppose the title of this post is inaccurate, because this moment is anything but abrupt and unexpected (quite the reverse, in fact); still, for whatever silly, stupid, melodramatic reason, I can't shake the idea of a sign post reading CAUTION: PRECIPICE AHEAD. 

Ehh...circling back to lemmings...this isn't a sudden plunge or death spiral so much as it is one of those cartoony moments where the legs pinwheel in space before shooting ahead across a canyon.  So I guess the moral is that we'll all get there soon enough.  Just stop asking me where precisely 'there' is...I think I'll need a month or so to find my bearings (or embrace freefall) and move beyond these college years.