The Graduate

In a recent spring clean of my apartment (said apartment looks just as messy/dirty as it did the week before I cleaned, by the way), I cleaned out some major items. I donated out-of-style clothes to Goodwill because surely poor people don't want to be in style. I sold the marginally cool clothes to a secondhand store. I threw out broken toys and things that BabyGirl had been using as toys that really weren't.

In the upheaval, I came across my undergraduate diploma, which had been handsomely framed as a graduation gift many years ago and then promptly stuck in a closet, where it stayed until I divorced and then I moved it to my new bachelorette closet.

When I found it, it dawned on me that perhaps I could be proud of my diploma. Hell, I could hang it in my actual office! That might lend an air of professionalism to offset the pink walls and overload of crayon drawings (not necessarily created by my daughter, either).

But this morning, as I hauled the thing up here, I remembered that undergraduate diplomas are a dime a dozen these days, especially in my field. I have no idea where my Master's degree is, though I suspect it's tucked in a closet somewhere, probably still back at my ex-husband's apartment. But even if I had that one framed nicely and hung up next to the undergraduate one, it's still nothing special. I mean, the only degree that confers a title on you is the doctorate. I still haven't figured out how to get people to call me Mistress Dirty Girl in honor of my education and not my proclivity for all things sexually subversive.

So now I'm left wondering if I should just not hang either until I get that Ph.D. I'll never actually get.