Chaucer was wrong: February is the cruellest month. At least, in my Spitsbergen it is. By February, I had done things I had never envisioned to be a part of my academic career (kindergarten up) and, perhaps a little snootily, attributed to a Certain Kind of Student. I had a dropped a class, and descended to the mellower, saner level of 25 credits. I had found myself in a professor's office making up an exam that I had skipped. I had asked for extensions on papers. The most macabre aspect of all of these was that I didn't care. And I still don't. And I know this. I am very aware that I do not care, and that I should, but I still don't. I remember how Hamlet sighed to me once, "I hate being so self-aware! Are we too self-aware?" Yes, indeed we are, and it's a bitch-and-a-half. I wished I was benighted, but I have been raised to give a shit and that was what was causing all the dissonance. So, indulge me and my dissonant places, constant reader! They help me cope.
My first explanation is that I am not there. Not receiving. Out of commission. Closed for Deconstruction. And I haven't been in: I've been visiting graduate programmes. I make it sound so glamorous, but it's actually quite pathetic. I did visit and interview at two (of eleven) places that I was invited to, and the rest I visited in dreams and visions. How can a brain so suffused with otherworldly musings be coaxed to ponder about trifles like inflation and the best ways to run electrophoresis gels? Preposterous! Why am I so in dreams? That is what The Great Graduate School Search does for and to one: as rejections pile up and pithy phrases like "not enough places in our programme..." and "not enough research experience" incorporate themselves into your daily ritual and rosary, one begins to feel lied to. All those people: parents, mentors, professors, friends who told you things like, "You're so clever!", "Any programme would be lucky to have you!" sound overwrought and platitudinous in the face of what admissions officials have to say. This fun train-of-thought calamitously clashes into this other cerebral locomotive that asks one why one prizes the opinions of those who've known one for ten minutes above the opinions of those who've known one for years. This, in turn, leads to agonising self-communion about perceptions, self-image and self-loathing. And you want me to do homework?! Ha!
My second line of reasoning, and I dwelt upon this one briefly, is that if I am not going to have a future why not give everything up now? If I am supposed to be working this hard for a cause that doesn't want me anyway, then why bother? It was after a week of thinking so that I realised that I was sounding like one of Those Teenagers, so I stopped. Of course I shall have a future! Right? Right. Yeah.
This journey hasn't been what I envisioned it to be. Poor, poor Miss Woodhouse in the big cities of Madison and New York: from botched interviews to amazing, connective ones; from social successes to gaffes of an intoxicated variety, it has all been surreal, like a kind of movie wherein you're watching the film and performing in it too. And yet, there is uncertainty. The uncertainty of agreements writ in water. What's a yes without the money? And you still want me to do homework?! I shan't!
Or so I thought. I actually did plod through homework and made decent grades on things that, by my standards, deserved to be substituted for toilet paper. 'Plod' is the perfect verb for this: I used to flit, pirouette and trippingly stamp out an elegant staccato of progress as I worked into the night. Now I lunge around drunkenly and half-ass things. Like that sentence where I just used "half-ass" as a verb. Melancholy at its most self-imposed is what I was going for, really. I fear this, truly I do, this transmogrifying into a monster of bitter self-concern, ugly pride and self-righteous "Pauvre moi!" tears. Of turning into a Fosca!
"No. You're coming home with me!"
What you've just read is the phrase that, to invoke a cliche, saved me from myself. A very angry Hamlet averred that I was: a) descending a spiral of self-destruction b) going to spend all of break obsessing about graduate programmes and make further progress down aforementioned spiral c) in need of home-cooking, home-loving, freedom from fighting the hours, and a chance to live them. I resisted: I could stay in the Spitsbergen, get some of my papers started (unlikely), get a head start on R.A. things (unlikelier) and pre-study for exams in two weeks (Ha!). Sound reasoning, but Hamlet was having none of it, and I am glad I listened to him. These days, I spend my days running around the Downtown of Hamlet's True City, skinny tie flying, latte in hand, trying to get to the theatre in time. I reconnect with old friends as we navigate around the skyway system that connects every building of relevance in the city and I do not think about graduate school. I do not think about who got in where whilst I am left waiting with uncertainties. I do not think about calling programmes who are "still reviewing" and asking them why they hate me.
I took in a charming production of 'The Winter's Tale' today, and I thought that the little boy who, with wisdom beyond his years, pipes up, "A sad tale's best for winter" surmised this situation perfectly, for winter brings with it uncertainty, so much so that we may begin to believe that we may never know spring again.
Until the flowers grow,
GossipGuy.
