It's Been A Month

not my longest absence -- but certainly an unpardonable one, given that i spent so many mornings and evenings in july sitting in front of my computer, staring at it or into the middle distance (grey's anatomy or gmail on the screen, so who cares? nothing was really *changing* or anything...)

now i'm back in philadelphia for the long haul, my hair pinned back in a sensible but odd-looking (because stunted) bun, in front of a different computer, thinking all the time thinking thinking. the to-do list grows longer shorter longer shorter. i should be in bed, but i am paralyzed by the fear that, once i go to bed, i will not want to wake up early in the morning and be productive. i am in a rut, the august rut that in school would have been the june rut: there's tons to get done, but i want so badly to deny that anything is actually important that in the end i get my way, and do facebook and livejournal and blogger, at the ridiculous and avoidable expense of more stress in the days to come.

no matter, i swam today. and someone outside -- maybe a member of the band i read lives across the street from me? but no, they were punk, or something -- is playing a trumpet or trombone or some other kind of wind instrument, alone, random, soothing. no matter.

the universe colludes: i have been thinking about monster books. tim carmody suggested erving goffmann's stigma. now i'm reading mel micir's old blog and i find this, as irrelevant to my life right now as bacon (the author, not the meat) but something i know i want to tuck away -- or put on display -- for inevitable future use:

"It is rare in 'natural' conversation that the best answer is provided on the spot, rare that witty repartee occurs. . . . Indeed, when during informal talk a reply is provided that is as good as the one that could be later thought up, then a memorable event has occurred." (Goffmann)

tuesday i will entertain in this apartment for the first time since the fall. who cares if the living room ceiling is dripping plaster everywhere!? i want more out of my graduate life, especially if this is to be my last year in philadelphia.

In Anticipation Of A Normal Life, Resumed

in 2 weeks i'll have moved into a new apartment *and* finished my 50-book exam.

i've been reading for the exam since memorial day (minus the several weeks in july that i was on vacation and at rare book school in charlottesville), so i've been feeling rather studious/nerdy/exhausted for weeks now. but the packing just began today, at full speed -- and already there are about 8 boxes worth of books/kitchen stuff/sweaters/linens/random trinkets sitting in my living room, waiting to be joined by the other 8 (and the 4 suitcases of varying sizes) that will get packed over the next ten days.

i can't wait!

Happy Little Things

i'm sitting in the grad lab, on a lovely friday evening in the summer, bundled up because it's cold, typing up notes on a set of 10 middle english lyrics -- part of the 50 book thing (see here <http://simran.nomadlife.org/2008/04/summer-of-books.aspx> for the latest official iteration of the list).

now, i like the poems, because they're interesting, and funny, and unfamiliar to me, generically (i've had more exposure to alliterative long-line poetry and iambic pentameter than to the short secular/religious lyric) -- so that's not the problem.

the thing is, one google docs file stands between me and going home for the day. my consolation is that, after i finish this writeup, i'll be just over 1/3 done with the reading for the exam. but still... to be outside, eating ice cream and being worry-free right now.... *sigh*

but my companion, for now, must be a box of cvs salted mixed nuts. peanuts/almonds/cashews. they are yum, somewhat healthy, and motivational. sadly, i think i like the almonds best. this is like what that psychology grad student dude i met once told me about the sort of unthinking decision we make based on a misleading perception that we'll be happier for it -- such as buying mixed yogurt, and feeling like that's better value for money, and that variety is the spice of life, when in fact we're more likely to just eat the peach or strawberry yogurt and glare balefully at the least favourite flavour as it sits in the fridge with no takers. exactly that, in this situation: i suspect there will be a ton of peanuts sitting in the tub at the end of this eating episode... and perhaps a lyric or two that will fall to the bottom of the list and be glared at, as well.

now, back to the notes.

*$s

dear diary,

today i drank my very first hot caffeinated beverage of the academic year: a tall caramel macchiato.

i just wanted to say how ridiculous i think that is.

because today is may 23.

and school began on september 5 of last year.

this means i drank no coffee all year. what kind of english grad student am i!?

(admittedly, maybe it's not quite that ridiculous, because coffee costs $3 a cup at starbucks, so it's just as well. and coffee tends to make me jumpy and give me stomach cramps, so it's really just as well. and also, *cough*, i've been drinking red bull, instead...)

WTF

when did it get to be 11:23 on the night before my piers plowman paper is due?

Summer Of Books

Fifty Book Exam List

I. Historical Period: Medieval
1. The Dream of the Rood (OE, MS 950-1000)
2. Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain (Latin, 1136)
3. Song of Roland (1140-1170?)
4. Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances (“The Knight of the Cart”) (late 12th century)
5. Marie de France, Lais (“Lanval”, “Bisclavret”) (late 12th century)
6. Winner and Waster (c. 1350)
7. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1385)
8. St. Erkenwald (c. 1386)
9. Corpus Christi plays: York Creation and Fall of Lucifer, Chester Noah's Flood, Brome Abraham and Isaac, Wakefield Second Shepherd's Play, Wakefield Herod the Great, N-Town Woman Taken in Adultery, York Crucifixion, and Wakefield Last Judgment (c. 1375-1570s)
10. Geoffrey Chaucer, selections from Canterbury Tales (General Prologue, Knight, Miller, Reeve, Cook, Wife of Bath, Friar, Summoner, Clerk) (1390s)
11. Julian of Norwich, The Short Text of Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393)
12. Selected Middle English lyrics: Luria and Hoffman ed. nos. 6 (“Foweles in the frith”), 77 (“I have a gentil cok”), 81 (“We ben chapmen light of fote”), 90 (“May no man slepe in youre halle”), 138 (“Maiden in the mor lay”), 178 (Geoffrey Chaucer, “Lak of Stedfastnesse”), 181 (“I sing of a maiden”), 182 (“Salve Regina”), 190 (“Now goth sonne under wod”), and 197 (“A God and yet a man?”)
13. The Alliterative Morte Arthure (c. 1400)
14. Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1436)
15. ** Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (criticism)
16. ** Tim William Machan, Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts (criticism)

II. Genre: Travels and Encounters
17. Heliodorus, Æthiopica (3rd century)
18. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (c. 1375)
19. Walter Raleigh, “Discovery of Guiana” (1596)
20. William Shakespeare, The Tempest (c. 1610)
21. Sir Thomas More, Utopia (1615)
22. Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine (1633)
23. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko or The Royal Slave (1688)
24. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726)
25. Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
26. H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon (1901)
27. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902)
28. Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy (1977)
29. Edward Said, Orientalism (1979)
30. Amitav Ghosh, Shadow Lines (1988)
31. Martin Scorsese, Gangs of New York (2003)
32. ** Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters (criticism)

III. Theme/Theory: Form and the Material Text
33. William Langland, Piers Plowman A-Text Visio (1360s) (authorial revision)
34. William Langland, Piers Plowman B-Text Visio (Prologue-Passus 7) (1380s)
35. William Langland, Piers Plowman C-Text Visio (Prologue-Passus 9) (1380s)
36. William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Q1) (1603) (printers/publishers/authors + editions)
37. William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Q2) (1604)
38. William Shakespeare, Hamlet (F) (1623)
39. Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus A-Text (1604)
40. Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus B-Text (1616)
41. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1852) (serialization)
42. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, selected poems (1855 and 1891 editions): “A Boston Ballad” (1854), “Song of Myself” (1855), “The Sleepers” (1855), “Song of the Answerer” (1855), “Song of Myself” (1891), “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (1891), “A Boston Ballad” (1891), “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd” (1891) as well as frontispiece portraits from both editions (authorial revision, self-publication, author portraits)
43. William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience (selections) (1789; 1794) (illustrations)
44. Emily Dickinson, selected published poems: “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers —”/”The Sleeping”; “Blazing in the Gold and quenching in Purple”/”Sunset”; “I taste a liquor never brewed —”; “Publication—is the Auction”; “This is my letter to the World”; “This was a Poet—it is That”; “‘Hope’ is a thing with feathers—”; “Because I could not stop for Death” (creation of the authorial corpus; order of component texts)
45. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts including the Annotations of Ezra Pound (1971) (editorial process)
46. Alan Moore, V for Vendetta (1995) (graphic novel)
47. James McTeigue, V for Vendetta (2006) (translation into another medium)
48. ** Robert Darnton, “The Printed Word” (Section 3 of Kiss of Lamourette): “What is the History of Books?”, “The Forgotten Middlemen of Literature”, “First Steps Towards A History of Reading” (criticism)
49. ** G. Thomas Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism (criticism)
50. ** Jerome McGann, Part I of The Textual Condition (criticism)

¿Qué He Hecho Yo Para Merecer Esto?

it's not even 9 a.m., and already i'm having the most horrible day i've had in weeks.

i got just 4 hours of sleep last night, i dropped my toothbrush down the toilet (what is up with me and doing that with important objects?), summer latin is looking like a vanishing possibility, and a friend just called me crying to tell me that his partner of 3+ years has been cheating on him and wants to break up to be with someone else.

in addition, my hair needs shampooing, my eyebrows need tweezing, i haven't been swimming in 5 days, my throat itches, and it's cold.

whine whine whine.

Mind-Twist

"The presence of paradox generally exhibits the force of an underlying desire, and for editors and scholars of Renaissance drama the desire is to reduce the multiple and dispersed intentions that shaped play-texts in the playhouse and the printing house into idealized, single-author works."

-- douglas a. brooks, from playhouse to printing house, p. 153.

what...?

Rare Occurrences

today is february 29 -- in ian's words, a perfect day to do something i only want to celebrate every four years. i'm not sure what that might be, but i'll be sure to keep my eyes open the rest of the day for something fitting! (i missed the beautiful total lunar eclipse earlier this month... i'm sick of letting opportunities pass me by!)

in the meantime, it is worth mentioning that i spent most of this morning intensely stimulated by another most unusual experience: i sat in on a harvard business school class on corporate strategy. (yes, this is how i choose to spend my free time... bite me!) now, i understand that 80 minutes of class discussion on organizational and personal competitor analysis, payoff matrices, first-mover advantage, NPVs, pricing, and M&As could be terribly boring, especially if you haven't read the case beforehand or have no interest in british satellite tv penetration and media wars... but i understood most of it even with my bare-bones understanding of business strategy -- and i was even able to anticipate questions and make some sound decisions in my head as i listened. seriously, i enjoyed the punchy analysis, the professor's commentary and jokes, and the class dynamic (laughter! engaged participation! applause for prospies from the class of 2010! applause for the former microsoft employee who served as ad hoc tech support! applause for me, the class visitor! even applause for the "first yogurt analogy of the term"!) immensely.

maybe i should put aside my secret MBA and really apply to b-school. i'm sure i'd at least be able to write interview-worthy essays -- and hey, if things worked out, i'd get a terminal degree faster than the one i'm due from the program in which i'm currently enrolled ;-)

At This Rate

so far this finals period i have written:

7 pages for heather
17 pages for peter and zack
25 pages for david

i'm currently at 32 pages for ania, aiming for about 40ish.

plus umpteen emails and facebook wall posts, some even with creative bent (one specific person has taken responsibility for precisely 97.3% of my prolific email production -- but the facebook monster is a separate and formidable sinkhole for words words words).

all in less than 3 weeks.

at this rate, i could be done with a dissertation in 6 months. it'd be mad painful (think of the red bull cans i'd accumulate... and the jitters that would keep me bouncing at 4 am... and the amount of wheat thins i'd have to consume...), and it might not even be that good, and i'd keel over and die right after...

but hot damn, i'd be a doctor of awesome!

Two Oversized Ironies Of Finals Week

i'm writing papers on madness and hell.

Negatory

for as long as i can remember i've hated the words "weak", "struggle", "try", "incapable" -- for their overall negative valences, really, but especially when used in relation to myself.

here's another "no" word that actually means something good: never. like, "never never never never never" (cf. king lear, who's currently chewing my brains). but also like, "never again [will i get myself into such a ridiculous pickle over final papers]."

n-e-v-e-r.

someone remind me of this week when it's late april 2008 and i'm frolicking like a fairy instead of writing like a fiend?

Nuclear Meltdown Alert

don't talk to me unless i talk to you.

seriously. just don't.

unless you are prepared for a barrage of some of the most disturbing and life-changing (yet profoundly eloquent, because i'm in graduate school after all) musings i've ever had.


(blog comments are still welcome.)

In...

. . . the closet: my imac box, an air mattress that doesn't inflate, and laundry that needs to be folded (stat).
. . . my travels: a trip to new castle, a trip to new york, a trip to old boston, and a wending of my way home.
. . . my piggy bank: numerous quarters, a couple of stray nickels and pennies, and three checks, each for a significant amount of money, from rare book school that (due to complications and logistical irresponsibility) i haven't banked yet.
. . . my bad books: mousies.
. . . my head: derri-damn-he-just-won't-go-away! (and barbara johnson, the "flippin' genius" who clarified some of his key terms for me in her brilliant introduction to dissemination.) god help me if i become a deconstructionist instead of a formal literary historian.
. . . my heart: sandy, my awesome cohort (raf, ash, tekla, dave, rachel, chris, kara, claire, katie, jon, phil, beth, lucia), and my brother.
. . . my bag: library books, wallet, ipod, water bottle, pens/pencils, readings, and part of one of the tines of the plastic fork with which i ate lunch today.
. . . bigtime trouble: if i don't get the reading done for tomorrow.

(expanded from koo's meme, at <http://chapatikid.blogspot.com/2007/10/in.html>)

Full Text Searchability

anyone who thinks organizing information by keyword [ie, searchability] is counterintuitive has obviously never been in my brain.

because you only really know how important full-text search is when you've had to dig (swim?) through hundreds of pages of reading in the last week, all seemingly having lots to do with each other (amazing intertextuality -- hello, this is graduate school!), and you're trying to remember in what article it might have been that you might have seen (or were you dreaming?) a certain sentence -- or was it a phrase? or a clause? what's the difference, anyway? -- which might have been on the left hand side of the page, perhaps in the middle, and which might have been about the simple-mindedness of the peasantry.

god damn the complexity and frustration of the partially-impaired, very overwhelmed visual memory.

this is why, when google finally announced and implemented a search box for google reader <http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/find-needle-in-feedstack-with-google.html>, i was thrilled. anything -- anything! -- to make me feel less muddled right about now, seriously.

***

update, 4:07 pm:

omg it's absolutely amazing. you can search all posts, or search certain folders, or search just certain blogs. thank you, gods!

Perfect Timing

phd comics (<http://www.phdcomics.com>) comes through with a new character -- gerard, a dweeby-chic (i'm talking grey turtleneck and librarian glasses) medieval scandinavian cultural philosophy grad student -- just in time for the beginning of my semi-decade of doctoral workaholism:

<http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=907>

yessssss!

thank you, jorge cham!

Ever Get The Sense...

that this is the first day of the rest of your life?

today, i have that sense.

the sunrise was especially beautiful. i'm grateful i was up to see it, jetlag be damned. hello, philadelphia!

CityLurve: Philadelphia

if i hear one more person tell me that philadelphia is a shithole/the ghetto/crime-ridden and depressed/not as good as new york, i will give them the look of death. or bust out my talons and rip right into them, depending on how annoying i found them before they went and opened their pie-hole.

i haven't spent much time in the city, admittedly, and the statistics do give reason for worry, and septa is about as inspiring in the field of public transportation as king kong is in the field of microsurgery, but the unmitigated hating? that just needs to stop already! because you know what? i like the skyline, i like the grid-like layout (boston, you have a lot to learn, buddy), i like 30th street station, i like the little squares with archaic names (fitler? rittenhouse?), i like the ubiquitous homage to ben franklin, i like the south st. creperie i was taken to on my first "real" day in the city (and the atmosphere of south st. in general), i like the view from penns landing, i like the street signs with rainbows on them, i like the architecture and the robert indiana sculpture in/near jfk plaza, and i like the painted little victorian houses in university city. so shush.

in this vein, the aarp magazine (which i was reading over lunch at work today because it had an ancient-looking kevin costner on the cover and i just had to find out what would inspire them to put his wrinkled fake-tanned goatee-wielding shaved-chested self in such a position of glory) is just beyond impolite.

you see, the magazine's july/august 2007 issue boasts an article on "50 things to know at 50" or some such (i guess you could call this advance reading... or something to make the tasteless food go down easier); #42 is "how to stay married". the advice for the more poetic among us is to "pretend your relationship (marriage) is a road trip. your wedding was the holland tunnel. your life is the new jersey turnpike. death is philadelpia. pretend there are no exits, only rest stops."

umm, hello? not only is that the most depressing vision of marriage i've ever heard (and i do consider myself at this stage an anti-marriage cynic), but also, how about we make death, like, idaho or somewhere else instead of the city in which i'm going to spend the next semi-decade? hmph!

If The Academy Is A Small World...

(which it is...)

then there are only so many people this could be:

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/girlfish1303/529425163>

(originally at <http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_a7jkcMVp5Vg/RlicAoSfthI/AAAAAAAAA3k/q07XMBpG7dc/s1600-h/makeup.jpg>, from the delightful and disturbing cache of <http://www.postsecret.com>)

to him or her, i say: you were probably following a dream when you applied to b, c, c, d, h, p, p or y. you should totally follow this one, too.

Where Would You Go?

or where would you guess i would go?

(i ask because so many people, when i tell them i'm picking between grad programs, respond in ways that lead me to believe that they think my decision should be based entirely on aesthetics. and because polls are fun -- when people respond to them!)

pick(s)@flick(r):

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/girlfish1303/446726442/>

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/girlfish1303/446726440/>

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/girlfish1303/446726438/>

i have to know by april 15, but even if you read this after that, feel free to leave comments on architectural appeal in the comments section.

Who Wants Columbia, Anyway?

the onion says it all!

(from: <http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28701>

Giant Cockroach In Bathroom 'A Harrowing,Kafkaesque Experience,' Grad Student Says

February 2, 2000 | Issue 36•03

NEW YORK–A routine toothbrushing turned into a profound exercise in nightmarish, existential horror Monday, when poverty-stricken Columbia University graduate student Marc Edelstein, 24, came across "the most gigantic cockroach this side of Gregor Samsa" in the bathroom of his one-room, walk-up efficiency.

"It was terrifying," Edelstein told colleagues at the Ivy League university's English department shortly after the encounter with the giant cockroach. "Every day, I can't believe I am living in that apartment. The humiliations society forces me to undergo, just to get my stupid Ph.D, defy all rational, intellectual thought. Sometimes, when I wake up in the morning and see the squalor in which I live, it feels as if I've somehow found myself on trial before a group of faceless, bureaucratic agents for some horrible crime I didn't commit, and no one will even explain to me what my crime was."

Edelstein, whose combined rent and tuition far exceed his meager earnings from work-study grants and a part-time job as a teaching assistant, has struggled with an insect problem ever since moving into the 108th Street and Broadway apartment in the fall of 1997.

Edelstein called the cockroach "a deeply disturbing symbol of the alienation and pain seemingly inherent in every aspect of modern grad-student life." What's worse, he said, the enormous insect so paralyzed him with "intense, soul-searing fear" that he was unable to kill it before it escaped down the drain.

"This wretched, prehistoric creature," Edelstein said, "has survived to torment me anew another day–a day of reckoning that, although I know in my heart is soon to come, I am nonetheless powerless to prevent."

The doctoral candidate is no stranger to hardship. In March 1999, Edelstein called his part-time job at the hot-dog eatery Gray's Papaya "a vision of underpaid, overworked, meat-flinging degradation and brutality that I dare say would not be out of place within the pages of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle." Despite mounting student-loan debts, Edelstein quit the food-service job in August 1999 in "a vitriolic burst of invective and abuse rivaling the most impassioned deliverances of Alexander Pope."

Edelstein has also suffered "innumerable indignities" at the hands of his landlord, Randy Bosio, whom the tortured scholar described to his dissertation advisor as "a fetid, shambling, coin-rattling wraith of a man who brings to mind one of the more unsavory, shadow-dwelling denizens of Dickensian London." On other occasions, Edelstein has likened his landlord to one of the nightmarish "Mugwump" creatures from William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, claiming that Bosio's sole directive is "to attach himself to the flesh of the innocent and suck them dry."

Said Bosio: "Something about that kid just ain't right. Once, I let myself into his apartment when he wasn't home, just to fix the sink, and when he got back and found me there, he accused me of 'an Orwellian invasion of individual privacy,' whatever that meant."

Edelstein's woes were compounded last October, when his eight-month relationship with Meredith Astor, the 26-year-old daughter of prominent New York arts patrons James and Patricia Astor, ended in a devastating breakup, prompted by Meredith's shame over Edelstein's low social standing.

"It was your basic F. Scott Fitzgerald situation," said Edelstein officemate Howard Underwood, who started dating Astor shortly after the split. "After Meredith left him, he plunged into a turbulent maelstrom of drink and despair. Every night was a nonstop party, a denial-fueled attempt to escape the inevitable collapse of the artificial world he had created for himself, masking his inner desperation and decay under a superficial veneer of false, empty revelry."

"I had to start picking up some of his T.A. hours because he wasn't showing up for discussion section," said Underwood, who will marry Astor in June. "Pathetic, really, much like the eventual fall of the gilded, faux opulence of the Jazz Age."

"Meredith's WASP-y, socialite, upper-crust parents never approved of me," Edelstein said. "Tight-lipped, goyish, Edith Wharton archetypes. I know she never would have left me if it weren't for the mannered, insufferable manipulations of her high-society family. Hello? The novel of manners has long since been supplanted as a reflection of prevailing social mores, people!"

After enduring such "infernal, Dantean torments of the soul," Edelstein said the cockroach incident was "the last straw," prompting him to decide to leave Columbia.

"That's it. After staring down at the writhing legs of that foul, accursed insect, I felt the horror of the void permeating my being to its deepest core, and I realized I cannot go on here at Columbia," Edelstein told his mother during a long-distance collect call shortly after his run-in with the cockroach. "I'm transferring to the University of Mississippi. Flannery O'Connor says a good man is hard to find? Well, a good graduate program is hard to find! I know I said I'd never do it, and that if I had to live in a horrible redneck cesspool of a state like Mississippi, I'd become so estranged from my surroundings that I'd end up like that Eudora Welty character who lives at the post office, but I've had it with New York. I can't go on."

"I'm giving up. Do you hear me, O cold, unfeeling universe?" shouted Edelstein, standing atop his building's roof. "You've won, you impenetrable void of utter meaninglessness! You have destroyed me at last!"

"The horror... the horror..." he added.

I'm In

corrigible

2 schools, one with funding, one without.

still waiting on nine more places, although i would definitely pick both my "in's" over some of the ones that haven't responded yet.

(i'm happiest about the fact that every time i go out of town i get another acceptance. i'm 2 schools for 2 trips right now. hoping for more good news by the next time i'm back in town! :))

***

update, saturday, february 24, 2007:

make that 5 schools, 3 with comprehensive funding, 2 with some funding but not as much as i'd like. also, 1 rejection, but who wants to live in new jersey, anyway!?

I'm Incorrigible

i know that checking my email compulsively won't make grad school responses come in any faster (or any more positive). but so far i'm 0 for 0, and i'm getting really antsy. plus i have nothing better to do (since i'm gainfully unemployed -- unless you count french transcription, which i don't.)

so gmail it is. over and over again.

uurrrrrgh!!!

Slackerface

i'm not going to apply for that last fellowship (yeah, the prestigious one that's sat on the to-do list and mocked me every time i looked at it for the last 3 months.) bite me.

for one thing, the deadline is feb 1 and i've been super late getting on the ball (although i have noone to blame but myself). secondly, the fact that i don't have to apply is a huge relief (almost all the programs i've applied to will offer me full financial support for 5+ years if i'm admitted and choose to attend). thirdly, the financial aid forms total 18 pages, and require extensive sets of USD figures i don't have. fourth, and corollary to the first and third points, dad -- whose expert skills i need to help me fill half the stuff out -- will shoot me if i tell him i need to start working on this now for submission by next week.

but as if all this wasn't enough to deter my erstwhile good intentions, the actual application totals 11 pages, and contains topic after essay topic (beyond the usual why do you want to pursue this graduate degree, what exactly do you want to study, and why have you picked x university in which to do so) that i don't particularly want to write about:
"what motivates you? how and why?"
"describe a time you were under pressure to make a critical decision. how did you respond? what was the impact of your decisions? faced with the same situation today, would you do anything differently?"
"discuss a piece, or pieces, of art, literature, music, or film which you created or in which you have participated. why is it meaningful to you? what have you learned?"
"comment on the following quote: "when admissions officers gather to create a freshman class, there is a large elephant in the room," wrote jennifer delahunty britz, in the new york times last week [march 23, 2006]: "the desire to minimize gender imbalance in their classes." britz, the admissions dean at kenyon college, wrote that her institution gets far more applications from women than from men and that, as a result, men are "more valued applicants." – chronicle of higher education; march 27, 2006"
and worst of all:
"what are your long-term career plans?"

(there's also a narrative autobiography, but we won't even go there.)

if you find yourself dying to work on questions like these, please go get your head checked. asapkthxbye.

yes, it's a lot of money, but frankly, at this stage, all i really want to do in life is watch salaam-e-ishq, go to goa next month, and take naps when i'm not randomly counting from 1-100 or conjugating simple verbs for french class. or eating blueberry cheesecake at moshe's.

mmmm, cheesecake. far more interesting than fellowship applications. non?

My Brain Is About To Implode

not from the stress, for once, but from the fact that i haven't done any app work today.

then i read this in a discussion on love and academia in the applyingtograd livejournal community:

I'm glad I'm not part of a (sic) academia couple. I have a professor nearing retirement who, since grad school, has never lived with her husband during the academic year.

(at <http://community.livejournal.com/applyingtograd/2072575.html>)

now that is real commitment to your cause. but please, oh please, may it never be my fate.

Tick Tick Tick

by december 20 i shall be done with grad school applications. after which? worry, bite nails, travel to out-of-town weddings, party like it's 2007, attend in-town weddings, wait, relax, worry, enjoy life, worry a bit less, grow nails, see a bit of india, wait, get new passport, hopefully travel abroad, wait.

update, tuesday, december 05, 2006:

have reevaluated situation; estimated date of completion now december 15. w00t.

update 2, saturday, december 16, 2006:

upon re-reevaluation (and the need to get out of the house instead of atrophying in front of the computer), have adjusted submission date back to december 20. it's less inhuman. and anyway, all i have left is one online app (an SOP, a short diversity essay, and a 15-page writing sample), plus one paper packet with an 8-page paper and a 17-page paper (the latter of which is done except for proofing) and another paper packet with a 15-page paper (which is also done except for proofing). after that: par-tay.

Good Sense Finally Prevails

britney spears is getting a divorce from kevin federline (erstwhile backup dancer, rapper who performs to miserable crowds of 300 or less in new york city, father of four, campaigner for the restitution of the honour of the penny, and gold-digger extraordinaire); the republicans lose senate seats in 3 states, including rick santorum's in pennsylvania!; deval patrick is elected governor of massachusetts, and is the first african-american to hold that office in the 218-year history of the commonwealth; and i have finally started working on grad school applications en serio, having decided to put the mind-numbing GRE subject test behind me once and for all.

today is already a good day, and it's only 11 am.

Isn't It Just, Like, Awesome

when it's 4 am and you're tirelessly (read: exhaustedly but doggedly) writing important emails to important people and on your 5th proofread before you hit "send", you catch a potentially-fatal typo?

i feel blessed when that happens. because my brain is so dead i could just be writing emails that say "cucumber cucumber cucumber" and wouldn't know the difference until that crucial 5th proofread.

i need a less sore throat, a cheerleader (make that a cheerleading squad), a campaign manager, a perfect writing sample, a steady source of ice cream, and a procrastination alarm that honks loudly in my ear and jiggles the screen like MSN messenger whenever i use the facebook to avoid doing work.