Bits n’ pieces

Welcome 2009! I had a reasonably refreshing break, although this one was plagued by concerns that I wasn’t doing enough to prepare for the new term. Eh, too late now. I did pay my bills, give and receive some lovely gifts, and spend time with family and boyfriend and friends…

Notes for the new quarter:

I will, once again, despite all my efforts, be on campus until 5 or 8 for four days out of the week. But! I have a locker at the gym, and can wile away some of those 4 hour blocks between commitments exercising, which is stress-relieving and productive.

God willing, I will have only 20 rather than 40 students this coming quarter.

I need to get started writing that lecture–my first lecture! Woohoo! And it’s on a topic I know almost nothing about.

Really should stop buying lunches/dinners on-campus, because it adds up and is probably unhealthy. Bean burritos and canned chili will be on the menu…beans really pull their weight in terms of cost and nutritional value.

Perhaps I could also bring some curry. I made a spicy Thai green curry with chicken this weekend, and I’m going to try using some firm white fish like pollack or cod the next go around. Put that on top of some brown rice, and–yum. I usually detest brown rice, but have really taken a liking to a 50/50 mixture of long grain white jasmine rice and long grain brown rice. At some point will transition to 100% brown (long grain) rice.

I need need need to go to Berkeley sometime in January, and perhaps February as well. It’s time to really get that damn prospectus started.

I have a terrible, bad attitude towards graduate school–this is not healthy and needs to be worked on. Every time I complain to my friends/parents about wanting to drop out, the response is usually: stick it out. It’s better than the real world. It’s not as bad as you think.

They’re probably right, and I am a big big whiner. With kind of low self-esteem about my capacity to achieve academically. A nice quote from David Foster Wallace (God rest him) comes to mind:

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

That last sentence rings a bell–ouch. Paradoxically, it seems as if I need to lighten up my attitude towards grad school in order to survive it; obsessing over–worshipping–academic things is only making things worse.

This quarter will be better than the last.