"Absence makes the heart grow fonder"

It's been over a year since I last posted.  I'm not sure that anyone has actually noticed, but...

So, I've finished my first year at Clemson in the History MA program and am well into my second year.  It's getting a lot more stressful because there is a lot more pressure to work on my thesis.  Grad school is also a lot different than I thought it would be, and I don't really love it at all.  I'm basically just doing what I need to do to finish this degree and be done with it.  This also adds to my stress because I obviously don't want to go on to get a Ph.D, so now I'm left trying to figure out what to do with my life since I won't be getting a doctorate.

It's also been really hard being away from my friends.  I have friends in Clemson, but most of them are more like friends of convenience, rather than the close friendships I developed in college.  This is made even harder by the fact that I am terrible at keeping up with people long-distance.  It's been especially hard to be away from Anna and it's difficult not having a relationship even remotely like ours here in Clemson.  Luckily, my dad gets some frequent flier miles and I've been able to visit her in Louisville, and she still comes home for holidays.  Still, it's not the same as when we lived together and spent almost 24/7 together for four years.  I miss her a lot.

In order to lighten this post a bit, I'll share some excellent things that some of my students have written on their exams in the last year or so:

• Napoleon and Louisiana were the king and queen of France.
• Catherine the Great said "let them eat cake."
• "During the Enlightenment, the well educated people's lifes thinking change due to new information available but this vast increase in nollege was slow to trinkle down to the pheasant farmers who few means of communication."
• The country of Europe was struggling before absolutism because it had no government.
• Kepler believed that the earth was the center of the universe and he was eventually proven right.
• Napoleon was a leading factor in the cause of the French Revolution, which led to the beginning of the American Revolution.