I spent the entirety of the 90s in graduate school; I spent the entirety of the "singles" (The Japanese refer to this decade as the "single-digit years") teaching. I learned today that I have finished paying off my undergraduate student loans; the graduate ones won't be done for a couple more months.

Highlights? Oh, there's a few every semester: that moment when they look up from their notes and listen, the unexpectedly good essay, the new book that works out well. Lowlights? Learning to deal with failure, daily, professionally, careerwise.

The biggest highlights of the decade for me, though, without question, were the birth of the Little Anachronism, the completion of the Ph.D. and blogging.

Highlights: Family, birth of the little ones. Several thousand students. Getting a job straight out of grad school, then a tenure-track job.

Lowlights: Ugh.