Statement of Purpose Word Cloud

I've been working so hard on my Statement of Purpose for only um...like five months now. Why is this thing so hard to write?! Oh yeah, because you are competing against hundreds of applicants, it is pretty much the only personalized thing that is included in the entire application, and it is supposed to convey all of my varied interests and desires in pursuing a PhD in 500-1000 words.

At this stage in the game, I felt like the best way to see if I'm really conveying my interests was to make a word cloud.  Narratives!  Subjectivity! Suffering! Work!  Yes.  That sounds like me.

Discovering the Ordinary

As I've been relegated to rest for the past week and for another week to come, I've been thinking a lot about how stressed I've been and why I've been pushing myself so hard lately to pursue my graduate degree and work full time in order to make my education possible.  There are lots of motivations that make that question nearly impossible to answer directly.  But one thing I know for sure is that I'm working toward this degree and hopefully a PhD because critical theory has been an incredibly meaningful and fulfilling way for me to make sense of everyday life. 

Perhaps the most prolific stereotype about academia is that it is totally removed from the reality of everyday life, and I definitely see how that is true in some circumstances.  However, the truth of the matter for me personally is that academia is where I am finding answers to real life questions that I find are answered on a fairly superficial level in the "real world" of social policy, etc.  One of the theorists that I am currently reading and have been for the past few months, Lauren Berlant (in addition to many of her articles that I've read, I just finished Compassion over the summer and am currently reading The Female Complaint), is someone I've mentioned before, but who I continue to return to because her work deals with the everyday in a critical and deeply thoughtful way that offers insights into widespread suffering that most people experience on a daily basis.  She doesn't deal with traumatic suffering, it is the kind of constant suffering that many people experience because of quotidian forms of suffering like financial woes, institutional racism, discrimination, etc.

I'm writing about her today because I was just listening to this podcast with her, and I think it is a really nice discussion about her new book Cruel Optimism which looks at how and why people desire the very things that are obstacles to their flourishing.  I think she is a really smart critic and thought many of you might enjoy this interview since it discusses issues that most of us think about on a daily basis and offers new insights and ways of thinking about them.  The interview starts at minute 3:30 on this site and is about 30 minutes.  I hope that you enjoy it and definitely let me know your thoughts if you do listen.  I'm always finding ways to talk about this stuff (as many of you found out at my birthday party last week).

R&R

I’ve had a bike accident that has left me with a diagnosis to take it easy for two full weeks.  No work, no school.  My doctor wants me so bored by the end of the two weeks that I’m aching to do ANYTHING. 

So, I am finding myself so far outside of my normal orbit that it has taken me an entire day to simply absorb this information and try to remember what rest and relaxation means for me.  TV actually has a high stress potential because the terrible plot lines and flat characters often frustrate me more than they entertain me.  Streaming movies is okay too, but there are only so many movies that interest me – and it turns out that about 75% of those are on DVD and not streaming online.

What is it then that relaxes me?  Well, as for day 1, it seems that finding ways to understand things I’ve been trying my hardest to understand helps me to relax big time.  It’s like that “aha! moment” is one long and extended aahh.  So, rest and relaxation for me looks a lot like reading and revelation.  I’m into Marx’s Capital right now. It’s only like the 15^th time I’ve tried to pick this book up.  But this time I have an amazing guide, David Harvey.

I just learned about David Harvey from my Global Mobilities class, and as I was looking up his name to try to decode some of his writing, I stumbled on his website months ago.  I’m reading Capital and following along with David Harvey's online course on it.   If the first lecture is any indicator, I think I will learn a lot…and relax a lot in the process.

Abstract Desires

I've just spent all day working on a 250 word abstract for my final paper in the Global Mobilities class.  It's amazing how long it can take to work on this stuff.  I've done a few things today besides that, like eating, filling out the general information for two more PhD applications, and spending a whole lot of money at ets.org to order score reports for the schools where I'm applying.  Here I am about 12 hours after starting on this assignment, still in my PJs, and I've finally posted the abstract.

The concept of feeling rewarded in my work is eluding me lately.  When I first started the master's degree I really felt fulfilled by the act of turning something in.  Now that I have more specific goals and desires for my work, I'm finding it harder to feel a strong sense of satisfaction once I've completed an assignment.  On the one hand, the lack of satisfaction is what keeps me driven toward pursuing this degree and the next phase toward a PhD.  However, I also realize that shuffling through my work without a sense of accomplishment is a recipe for burnout, even if it takes a while to get there.

I just came across this article, "Grad-School Blues," written for the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2009 that begins: "Graduate school is gaining a reputation as an incubator for anxiety and depression.
Social isolation, financial burdens, lack of structure, and the pressure to produce groundbreaking work can wear heavily on graduate students."  Yep.  That about sums it up just right.

Marching to Your Own Beat...

...is hard in a standardized test.

It's been a rough week.  A lot of unexpected things have happened in a time when I only have barely enough time for the things that are already happening.  I have no room for error right now, and there's been a lot of error this week.

I keep thinking--frankly obsessing--over errors as I work toward a successful GRE subject exam this weekend.  It's an enormously frustrating thing.  I figured that if I bring my frustration to bear on my community of friends who read my blog, perhaps sharing and diffusing my pains will make it all feel a little better.  And maybe you will find this interesting.

Of all of the annoyances of the GRE, I can think of at least two things it has done for me over the past week of cramming:

1) I learned that marching to the beat of your own drum comes from Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1843): "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.  Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."  Now, of course, it is riddled with white patriarchal language.  But now I know where it comes from, and I do like the sentiment.

2) I read Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe (1616), which is an excellent story.  My cynicism says that Marlowe will show up on the exam in the form of "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love," which I'm not sure I will recognize.  But hey, at least I had a moment of pleasure in the midst of my studying.

And now, for my moment of optimism, I will share my top two frustrations lest you all think that I actually value this test or the time it is taking me to study for it (which is time that I am taken away from PhD applications, writing sample, statement of purpose, homework, household duties, social time, etc. etc.):

1) Who the hell needs to know about Robert Herrick's "Julia Poems"?  Herrick is apparently a "cavalier poet" who is one seriously lustful man.  In a poem called "Cherry-ripe" he talks about...take a guess?  Her lips.  He even writes about her clothes: "WHENAS in silks my Julia goes,/Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows/That liquefaction of her clothes./Next, when I cast mine eyes and see/That brave vibration each way free ;/O how that glittering taketh me!"  Is this really literature?  Me thinks not.

2) Thomas Carlyle.  What?  You've never heard of him?  That's because he wrote one thing, Sartor Resartus (the tailor re-tailored) in 1833, that was barely publishable then and certainly wouldn't be now.   The main character, Professor Teufelsdrockh, ponders "the philosophy of clothes."  I cannot understand why this shabby piece is considered part of the cannon and the majority of 20th century literature that most of learn is not on this damned exam.

What's a student to do with this ridiculous form of testing literature?  Did someone say bunburying?

Too Much Testing Makes the Student Go Blind

So, the good news is that I got the official word that I passed the comprehensive exams! The bad news is that I can't quite bask in the awesomeness of that because now I'm onto cramming for the GRE Subject Test, which happens this weekend. I somehow went from not having any kind of exam for years to having the GRE general test, the comprehensive exams and the GRE subject test all within a 3 month period. I even have a final exam -- a rarity in a literature program -- on December 19th!

All of the cramming--because really, at this pace, cramming is the only way--is having an effect on me. It's showing through in my dreams, for example. I'm having very weird dreams where I'm either flagging pages with post-it notes or telling people about how irrelevant John Ruskin is in my dream conversations.

I've even tried to maximize my time by watching the most horrible film adaptations of classic literature (like the Odyssey from 1997, which is really just too awful for words) to refresh my memory on the name of the islands where he gets lost and blah blah blah...the movie is so bad that in the movie trailer they resort to citing praise from the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

My waning optimism has been reduced to a hope that I might finally fulfill my wish of being awesome at pub quizzes. I'm usually too slow to respond, and I think of the answers at like midnight long after the quiz is over. Anyone (which is pretty much all of you who have ever played a game with me) who has beaten me at trivial pursuit or any other game might reconsider me as a worthy team member. That's all I'm saying.