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i have four hours before i need to talk for at least an hour about the absolute lack of progress i've made in the past three months. there's reasons this has been a scanty handful of months on the science front -- kavanaugh's supreme court confirmation knocked me on my ass for weeks, then the midterms did the same, then thanksgiving and a funeral knocked me on my ass for a third time. plus i'm in the process of writing a bunch of science words.
i've also written about 60k of fanfiction in the intervening time. might have had an impact. (worth it)
so i'm eating wawa soft pretzel, underbaked exactly the way i like them. i'm listening to the new LP album even though it's overproduced and not as good as her older stuff. it's hazy outside; i judge the clarity of each day from my window at work by how many bridges i can see in the distance and the second one is a barely visible smear of blue against the white sky.
graduate school is hard for me. i will never believe i'm good at this.
i've also written about 60k of fanfiction in the intervening time. might have had an impact. (worth it)
so i'm eating wawa soft pretzel, underbaked exactly the way i like them. i'm listening to the new LP album even though it's overproduced and not as good as her older stuff. it's hazy outside; i judge the clarity of each day from my window at work by how many bridges i can see in the distance and the second one is a barely visible smear of blue against the white sky.
graduate school is hard for me. i will never believe i'm good at this.
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(i feel like my engagement with jargon falls into one of 4 embarrassing categories:
1) forgot that was a thing. is that a thing?? amazing, that's so true. (eg: 'overproduced')
2) forgot that was a jargon. what? it's just a word people say when they mean this thing! god! (eg: 'milieu')
3) i don't know what this means but i'm determined to keep using it the way i have been (eg: 'metaphysical')
4) well this sentence is going to end on an embarrassingly polysyllabic note and i sure do not see any way around it (eg: look, if i had an example, i wouldn't have this problem, would i))
as you know i have nothing inspirational to say about grad school, because grad school is fundamentally hell, i'm sorry. :\ fwiw i think there is some basically dumb elemental nature of grad school which exists also + on top of how bad and awful science grad school is in particular (theory ongoing), to do with...committing your entire life to being told that you're a halfassed non-expert on the thing you're doing with your entire life. which isn't an aspect i had thought in depth about until Recent Events have prompted me to.
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i hadn't thought about the way it's disheartening to be called a "trainee" after six years of doing something. i'm so ready to be treated like i have experience. for example, i can give a forty-five minute presentation basically without reviewing anything because i just know it by now! when will this be worth something??
i feel better now that it's over. tomorrow i'm going to sleep as much as i want and maybe write something.
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i think there's also smthg weird, esp for your kind of grad school, abt the way that grad school is a complicated trap for your skills. like, you can't sit and rationally assess your job & what is bad about it & decide to leave: is it because of your supervisor? is it the work itself? is it your particular institution? maybe you just can't live where you do bc of your SAD and need to move to california! or maybe you are tired of the people you work with and want to meet some new ones --
-- nope, you have 0 transferrable cred until you finish the damn degree, so you only get to think about it as like 'is all of this worth what i will someday get out of it'.
& this particular side of it is less of a Thing for me, bc my degree is so minimally useful (altho not 0, somewhat surprisingly), but it's like -- why did i even do this if i'm not going to do the full two years of it? so still a bit of a trap.
more tiringly for me, i think, is the thing you allude to: i have been doing this a lot, it's weird to suddenly exist on this extra Student tier for it.
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And grad school is really really hard, but you've held up there so far, so I have confidence you'll be able to keep going.
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Turns out that it's a lot easier to write fanfiction when you're putting off something you hate, like, say, graduate school. This has definitely been my most productive writing stretch in a long time, even though it has not produced as much scientific paper as it really should have.
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I think back on grad school and I can remember exactly two times I was told I did a good job on something I did.
I think it'd be hard anyway but they definitely don't make it easier.
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It's just...man I have a lot of complaints about how graduate school is run and what it does to students. I'm financially stable, my boss is kind about time off and she doesn't sexually harass people, and my personality means that I can spout off in a meeting and people will think I'm smart, and still -- hard.
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This isn't a good way to motivate myself to write about science, but whatever! It's true!
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I am continually in awe of you and I hope the soft pretzel helped.
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I ended up sitting down through the whole thing instead of standing using the excuse that I felt pretty lightheaded, which helped. Also I said fuck it and shortened it to 45 minutes with 15 minutes for questions instead of the usual two hour lab meeting.
Wawa soft pretzels always help!!
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