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[isozyme]

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.

Comments

[isozyme]

turns out overproduced is in the #2 category for me, whoops.

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.

[elanid]

yeah i mostly meant it as like "...wow what a useful word for a thing i complain about mostly by waving my hands angrily!", tbh

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.

[isozyme]

at this point every time i think the words "sunk cost fallacy" i stick my fingers in my ears and go LA LAA LA LA LAA LAA