One of the things about being a grad student for years on end is that you learn how to have a lot of fun for not very much money. This seems like a useful thing to know. Out of the 20 days we spent on the road, we actually paid for two nights of hotels. The rest was generous use of family guest rooms, travel reimbursements, frequent-stay points, and credit card thank-you points.

Learning to be cheap is the price you pay for the general freedom afforded you in grad school. I’ve worked an industry job and I’ve worked this job, and it’s not new news to any of you that I vastly prefer this one. You work a lot, but you mostly pick those hours. If I’ve going to work 60 hours per week, it helps if 50 of them are my hours. Those are my school-year hours; I work less in the summers. And I didn’t work at all for the three weeks I was on the road. (Hell, I barely even read — took a stack of Ray Bradbury along, and didn’t even make it all the way through the first one off the top, Dandelion Wine. According to my anal-retentive listkeeping, I’ve read 33 books so far this year, but none of that happened on the road.) When I came back, there was still a paycheck coming in. Compatriot G. and I were talking about our luck yesterday at lunch. We haven’t gone to work in a month, and a paycheck appears! And we’re both teaching one class this summer. We’ve both spent summers filing and toiling in kitchens and painting houses and working smelt decks, and now we get to do this? And they pay us what we think is relatively good money? Two nights of my week are spoken for this summer, and on those nights I work inside, in air conditioning, never getting my hands dirty. Barring unforeseen melees, when I finish the night my clothes will look pretty much the same as they did when I started. The work is work I love to do. And the rest of my time is mine, for working on my own work and for finding my own play.

One of the best things about living in a tundra town is that the people bust loose in the summers. Minnesotans are out during the months of the year that they can be, and all summer there will be festivals and concerts and exhibitions. If they’re not free outright, there’ll be a cheap night somewhere in the run. A few days ago, I saw The Brass Kings at the Mill City Live series. (Steel guitar, washtub, and washboard. I’d never seen a washtub played before except on TV.) Then we wandered through the Daniel Corrigan exhibit (technically proficient but uninspired) and the Mill City Museum (free because of our Historical Society membership, but completely worth the usual cost of admission.)

Yesterday we ended up at the tiny-yet-amazing Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis, viewing their current Mapplethorpe exhibit. (Mister Husband wrote about it.) Seeing that grouping of photographs arranged so simply in the small storefront space provided a completely different, somehow purer, experience of Mapplethorpe than I’ve previously had in larger exhibit spaces. That gallery is one of the small gems of the Twin Cities.

The magic thing is that we have the time to get out for such things. When I had a job, this never happened. When I was taking the LSAT prep course a couple of summers ago, other students were appalled that I would accept a professor’s salary instead of a lawyer’s. But the thing is, I would never want to do a lawyer’s job or live a lawyer’s work life. The Awesome Russian Lawyer’s wife and daughter are headed to Moscow and points beyond this summer, but he is staying right here and working. It makes him a little sad. It makes me a little sad for him. And when I wonder why the hell I’m not in law school, it reminds me that trading a larger salary for more time seems like an even swap to me.