I won't go into the gory details, but today has been a strange day. The kind of day where you say to yourself, ok self, what the heck are you doing, and can you not make a plan to do it? I did create our new-for-2010 budget -- a fancy excel spreadsheet that essentially allocates every cent we have coming into the house for the next 14 months. Not the cheeriest task, but actually not the worst either. After doing a fair amount of daydreaming (aka looking at design blogs), and a fair amount of more daydreaming, at about 8:30pm I decided to email Grafton Academy, a fashion design school, to get an answer from them to an email I'd written way back in December regarding whether they'd give me the EU tuition rate (just over 5k euro) rather than the non-EU rate (9k euro). Much to my surprise, the phone rang a half hour later. I didn't recognize the number but I answered anyway. It was the very nice "Principal" of Grafton Academy herself, responding to my email.

We chatted for several minutes, and while I would go to her school in a heartbeat if I could pay for it, the long and the short of it is that there's pretty much zero chance I can get the EU rate without an EU passport. Well, I'm about 5 years away from an EU passport, so...

I explained my already extensive debt from previous schooling (68k for those keeping count), but alas and alack, it didn't prompt any exceptions to policy. While the tuition isn't expensive by American standards (I wish all my schooling had been that cheap!), I just can't rationalize going another 30k into debt, even if it could mean the difference between someday having a career in fashion and giving up on my dream.

These are the happiest times of my life. I don't regret moving to Ireland, and I do many, many things that make me happy here. I have family and friends, and every day brings something new and cool. But sometimes...sometimes it does feel a little like purgatory. I wonder if I'd have better luck going back into academia. Should I keep fashion as a hobby and get that elusive PhD?