my baby's in the white fluffy clouds

Oh definitely there are still some major issues. There is stupid drama that has real and material affects on people I care about. There are political things that constrain me from doing precisely what I want, although I have wriggled out from under enough of them that I care way less. There is the usual deside of grad school to eat all of your time and energy, which I refuse to let it do because I have a life goddamnit. And there are pretty serious potential financial issues affecting other folks that mean I am holding onto my job like whoah, but I would do that anyway because I actually like my job, so it doesn't really affect me, but I am still worried because it affects everyone else. But at the beginning of the semester, many of these things were worse, and the good things weren't present either. Grad school and the academy in general are, as far as I can tell, always going to be full of this kind of badness. It has a very real chance of causing me to take my PhD and run screaming; it is now way less likely to cause me to do the run screaming part first.