Some days you wake up and think: What the fuck am I doing? There is no minimum wage in graduate school. No one thanks you for reading Ulysses and Anna Karenina and Viktor Shlovsky. One could argue that someone pays you for these things and you could argue back: cents on the hour.

But then, some days, sometimes those same days, you talk to someone or read something and it all comes into focus. No one ever said it’s easy or even a very good idea to pursue, as a profession, something you love dearly, something you can’t live without.

And so you sit on your front porch while the dogs sleep restlessly inside and there is that warm, impossible breeze down from the mountains–the one that brings the equally impossible seagulls–and you think: How could I ever do anything else.