School at night, production in the morning

From 2018 to 2020 I was in two places at once. Days belonged to a bank in Los Angeles. Evenings and weekends belonged to Texas Tech — a master's I had started in the same soil as my bachelor's, Lubbock, a town that does not flatter you into thinking you are already finished.

I would not recommend the arrangement as a lifestyle. I would recommend what it did to my attention. When your hours are scarce, you stop decorating the work. You do the part that matters and you leave. You learn the difference between a problem that is hard and a problem that is merely noisy.

Graduate school, for me, was not a performance of intelligence. It was a second chance to become precise. The first degree taught me how to enter the field. The second taught me how to stay with a question after the easy answers had been used up. Working at the same time kept me honest. Theory that cannot survive a working day is just furniture.

There is a loneliness to that season that I do not romanticize. You miss dinners. You become a person who is always slightly behind on sleep and slightly ahead on a paper. You learn who will still call you. You learn that you can be tired and still be kind, which is a more important skill than any course title on a transcript.

I think about that version of myself when I am tempted to rush now. She was not impressive. She was faithful. She kept two promises at once and did not ask the room to clap for it. I would like to keep being her, even now that the calendar is less split.

Texas Tech is in the ground of my life the way a hometown is. Not as a slogan. As a set of winters, a library, a few professors who did not let me get away with being almost clear. I am still trying to write and work at the standard they pointed to without naming it.