4 posts tagged “school”
Hey, it's been a while! I defended my thesis last week, and as soon as that happened I became very lazy and very happy, and very lazy.
Seriously. It's the last week of class, but I can't do any work. I have a bunch of finals stuff but I just can't get anything done. Instead, though, I've been being human again: I've cooked dinner with M. nearly every night in the past week, watched a bunch of fun things (including "Waking Life" D+ [directionless; bad writing; cool look], "Juno" which gets an A- [very cute; George Michael and Michael Bluth in one movie!; somewhat predictable; awesome soundtrack], "Lars and the Real Girl" which gets a surprising B+, and "Slings and Arrows," which is too good to grade). I've sent letters to my grandparents, I've taken a walk almost every day, I've slept late, I've gotten to email friends, we've had time to discuss (briefly) wedding planning; I've even had time to be BORED. What the heck? It's like... normal life is back?! The real me is back too, as the people around me will be glad to know - no more weird crying fits or monosyllabic responses or failures to do any chores ever. Certain persons who cooked and cleaned everything for me for two months (and to whom I am very, very grateful) will be particularly relieved, I suspect.
Just to celebrate spring and May 1st (though it's not related to workers in any way):
I'm glad to report that other parts of my life seem to be ok too: my school hasn't completely fallen apart, though it will be going through some growing pains. I'll know more about this over the summer, I think, if the committee ever starts meeting. We don't have to move this summer - excellent! I don't think I'll have a garden but hope to join a CSA or find a decent farmer's market. We've been talking a lot about what we eat and how we live and whether it can be (affordably) more environmentally sound - strategizing about "carbon footprint"s and organic vegetables and about how bad the beef industry is. I'm not trying to turn anyone vegetarian but sometimes you really have to stop and think...
My sisters seem to be doing well; my baby niece is now six weeks old and has already outgrown a piece of clothing. She has tiny eyebrows, apparently. Amazing! I hope to meet her in a few weeks. My parents are thinking about taking a trip with my great aunt, which could be a combination of wearing and hilarious, but she's an accomplished traveler and I think they'd probably end up having a good time. I'm pushing for Italy in September but it's all up in the air. They deserve it, though, they're working really hard. So is my sister R.; I hope she finds another job soon, one where they can afford to treat her properly (I'm worried she's getting burned out). She'll get a little vacation this summer, which is nice.
I hope this finds you well, and somewhere with cherry blossoms or daffodils or tulips.
Today the NYT reports, The gross domestic product, the widest measure of all goods and services produced in the United States, rose by a sluggish 1.3 percent in the first quarter. Yeah, this is how I feel today: sluggish.
Today I'm blogging because it's raining and I feel like writing. The events in my life aren't tied together in any cohesive way that lends itself to lyricism. What common thread can I weave among my parents coming to visit, rain, a potential kickball game, a good lecture about the true mission of psychology, difficult decisions that I can't seem to give any intelligent advice about, and touchy social dynamics in my department? I can't use just one metaphor, a fruit tree, a tapestry, a road. These are things I used to try to impose on life as I wrote poems. Right now I can't do that.
Seeing my parents will be lovely, as it's been quite a while. Rain makes me want to take a nap, but at least it's not freezing, and summer is well on its way. I hope the kickball game goes on tomorrow despite what will be an extremely soggy field, and the fact that I can't remember how to play and haven't since fifth grade which was (gasp) in the late 80s.
The lecture I saw last night, by a psychotherapist called Nancy McWilliams, really woke me up. I've been so focused on class that I forgot that this field is one that is worthy of having entered with a calling. The way she put it was that the world we live in creates so many casualties, especially our particular society (so much alienation), and that the therapist's job is to ease some of the worst suffering. Unfortunately, insurance companies and the medical model of treatment sort of undermine what should be a wholistic view of the person, so it's important to keep that in mind - too often we think about mental illness instead of mental health. I can't wait until I get to start doing clinical work.
M. is facing some difficult choices right now, and I can't seem to give him any helpful advice, despite having negotiated transitions and relationships in an ethical way and without burning bridges, despite my best efforts to think creatively, despite the fact that I really want to find the magic answer. It frustrates me that wanting to and being able to are so different sometimes.
And as for the dynamics, I always find myself in this position, the diplomat, the big sister - trying to ease the strains of relationships for people who don't really get along. In college this was more overt: one roommate threw a mug at another roomate's head, I tried to calm her down, etc. Here at grad school it's different. People snub each other subtly. Not many of them, and maybe not even intentionally, but all it takes is a little roll of the eyes, a little turn of the shoulder, and someone feels excluded. I wish I could just fix it.
Anyway, last night as I heard my friend and classmate talk about how it feels to be excluded, I knew that I needed to start listening more, talking less, at least until I can say I've really heard the other person. This is my lesson.
This is the lull in my week, the day I don't have classes, the time when I should be studying as hard as possible but when I realize that I haven't written to anyone in a few days and that there are roofers who need to be called and emails that need to be sent and lives I need to catch up on. I guess this is one of the drawbacks of attending school outside of the city while the neighborhood I have the most ties to is in the city; it's sort of living a split life. But now I have a second home, closer to school, and my life is starting to feel more integrated, and I certainly feel more whole than I have for many years. Also, I suspect the split life phenomenon comes more from attending school in general; it tends to pervade a large part of my brain much of the time, whether it's ideas about mindfulness or trying to remember what a standard deviation is. I'm getting better at switching, though, from one sort of thinking to another. I think I was probably able to avoid talking about school for at least five minutes when I had dinner with my friend A.K. the other night, for example.
Yesterday I was telling some of my classmates about what a difficult child I had been; I had a bad temper (I used to bite my sisters when I got mad), I wouldn't let anyone move anything in my room, and had to have everything just so, I was bossy and a perfectionist... Aside from laughing at me (apparently they think I have become slightly more laid back) one of them asked, "How did you overcome that?" It's not something I'd ever thought about. Are personalities shaped by experience, by contact with other people (did the hours I spent with O. and other friends in middle school change me? or was it seeing that I didn't have to control everything in my environment? or was it the shift from bossiness to being a maternal older sister that marked a change?), or just by time? How much of who I was in college is who I am now? (Actually, this is a funny question that I sort of discussed when I visited C.M. in Columbus in August; I think I'm more like my college self than I have been for years).
There aren't huge updates to give you; school is moving along; my brain is constantly struggling to keep up. We're still interviewing for two temporary faculty positions, and I'm not sure how many more candidates I'll interview by the end of the term; there've been at least two good prospects. My sisters are doing well and being busy; my parents are adjusting from their Thailand trip by starting lambing season; so far there has been one set of triplets born. It's been a long time since I was at the farm, and I'm hoping to go back in May to see all the pronking action (plus, I don't think M. has seen enough embarrassing photos of me as a child). Spring is when I miss the farm most, because even when I was a self-absorbed high school student, I could track the progress of the plants every day and knew all the smells of the ground as the months got warmer....
My last word is this: I can't wait for summer, when I won't have homework -- I have fantasies of studying French and getting some work done on my thesis and taking weekend trips and going hiking and seeing friends and waking up in the sun with all the windows open, all under a faint haze of honeysuckle and sweat.
So, I have this new job as a grader for an undergraduate course this semester, a real honor because I have never taken the course in question, and also because it's unusual for first-years to be asked to TA or grade. I maintain that this job is entirely a product of the fact that the professor likes me. Well, I'm grateful, whatever the reason. Suddenly I hold these awesome powers, deciding these students' fates, entering grades into the professor's gradebook, and giving them feedback on their writing. Why this is much, much scarier than giving grownup businesspeople feedback that will affect their admission to Harvard Business School, I cannot tell you. But it is (now that I'm a quasi-TA, I get to start sentences with "but" if I want to).
Some of these students are not quite as good writers as I'd like to see in this caliber of student from this caliber of school. I don't care how much you use spellcheck, for a 100-word short answer question, you should know the difference between a "causal" relationship between events, and a "casual" one! There's a big difference!
Anyway, I should not rant, these people are mostly trying hard, and I don't know much more (in terms of the course topic, at least) than they do, so I need to be a little humble.
In other news, I have not been writing anything creative. Words aren't quite right anymore, somehow, at least not ones that I would jumble together in an impressionistic way so as to create something that's greater than the sum of its parts -- somehow it's just not working. Maybe there are some times in life when swimming and eating and studying and smiling and hanging out are all right on their own, and not everything needs to be expressed or explored with words.
(That's what I tell myself now. Give me another few months like this and I may implode, or, worse, write some Really Horribly Bad Poetry).
