Refugee: The Horror never fully goes away.

Many lives ago, even before my soul-selling stint in Big Agency PR, I was a PhD student, attempting to forever cram myself into that elite niche known as "Over-Educated and Under-Employable." I cracked after passing my qualifying exams and before the dissertation process, jaded and crabby. But today, the terror all came crashing down around me as if I had chosen instead to hide forever behind the small solace of making people I didn't like call me "Dr."

As I loaded the kids into the car at the grocery store, I did my usual thing and turned on the radio, wondering what sensible conversation Diane Rehm would be offering up to me today. To my utter and abject horror, I arrived just in time to hear an imperious caller begin to hold forth on the Supreme Court's recent decision involving Eminent Domain. "I think that there is a Hegelian Dialectic at work here!" He tossed out this tremedous bomb stuffed with horse doody as if to dare anyone listening to have the temerity to ask what the heck he was talking about. And all at once, my grad student PTSD kicked in.

I screamed. Not just in my mind, but in my "out loud" voice. And quickly...oh, SO QUICKLY, I jammed my finger into the radio button for fear that I would actually have to once again suffer hearing a human being utter the word "hermeneutic."

'Cause, if THAT happened, I'd be forced to jam my car keys through my eardrum to prevent further such assaults. Oy.