This week, a year ago, I was finishing up my last grad school classes. I was also working 700 jobs and applying for 1,400 more and staring down a summer that could end in triumph, disaster, cross-country move, or complete mental collapse. But this is all a way to say that although I am still only a few bus stops away from where I was last May, my life is in a different zip code. A different stratosphere.

I don’t want to wax too poetic about shifting identities and growing up, but that’s what’s going on. It’s what’s always going on. My days in grad school were probably overstuffed, but every day had a measuring stick – pages to read, articles to decode, papers to write. At the end of so many days was the measuring stick of a semester. If you measured up in December or in May, then anything you did with your days, your hours, felt like time well spent.

Now, I have more days and hours to work with, but those hours take on more weight. They stand on their own. They are 100% mine. Whatever I decide to do with them, that’s me. That’s pressure, but that’s life. Just a different life.

It changes the way I spend those hours, it does. It changes the way I read, and which books I choose when I do. I like to feel good about my hours – productive, like a good session of schoolwork, a nice workout – but I’m also trying to use my time to remember some old things. Life before grad school, when I used to have time to burn. Life when I was a kid, when I had a myriad of authentic (albeit fairly offbeat) passions. Life when I was in school, and every idea about children’s lit was going to be a future article, thesis, novel.

Not easy, balancing the long-term and the short-term, the hours and the weeks, the weeks and the months. Blogging is getting the short end of the stick, getting pushed out right now by other activities, but also because I’m not reading the kind of books I like to blog about. I’m not going anywhere, though. I like to know this space is here, and I hope that my infinitesimal number of readers will wait around for me. Don’t worry – as long as I’m still writing and reading, no matter how I divide up the hours, I’ll be around.