the end of finals

For weeks the the stress and tension and anticipation had been building up. All the hard work all semester long, all the late nights, stumbling home on the last train at 1 am only to get up at 7 and go back in to school to finish assignment after endless assignment.... all the hours sitting in class, scribbling notes, reading textbooks late into the night... all the studying for midterms working through old problems again and again... trying to balance teaching, grading, and some small semblance of a social life (usually the first thing to get axed) along with cleaning, cooking, grocery shopping, paying bills, eating, sleeping... all of it lead up to the final exams that could make or break one's grade. Plasma waves, dispersion relationships, plane wave solutions, linearizing, collisions, MHD, cold fluid equations, Landau damping, Hydroxy radical, rigid rotors, books from the library, studying on trains, equation sheets in a ziplock bag in the shower, falling asleep with books all over my bed, last minute cramming, whining to Dipesh, gathering fresh pencils, filling my water bottle... then suddenly it was all over. Too soon. The end. Finals taken. Anticlimax. I'm left with a feeling of emptiness and lack of direction and motivation. I didn't do nearly as well on my exam as I wanted to. It's frustrating. But moreso than the frustration is this weird feeling that I have nothing urgent to do. There's nothing keeping me awake at night. Nothing I have to finish before bed, and nothing that wakes me up in the middle of the night from stress. I can sleep when I want, and, for once, I can sleep enough. I can read books for recreation. I can watch movies. I can go to the park. Or I can sit on my bed and do nothing. And think. That's what I've been doing. It feels weird.