Gradschool Blues….

I am susceptible to a rather ineffectual combination of envy and apathy.

Envy might be attributed to living in city that really is a huge college town, and being surrounded on all sides by students, professors, bookstores etc the squirming organisms of life that populate the big drafty ivory towers of universities. I miss being in a petri dish. I mean the academic bubble. (Hanging around two biologists affects my language, and Claire’s worms are actually very cute) I miss the general lack of responsibility a student has. Having no fixed routine, but stressed to the faultlines every other day over some new crisis. I’d take that any day, that willing, meaningful busyness, over a 9 to 5 braindead employee chained to a desk. Heck, sometimes I’d take that over just being a bum sitting at home and indulging in fun novels and reality tv. The problem being, if I am not kept busy by some constraint/deadline/threat of failure, I am very liable to dissolve in a puddle of languor, lethargy, straight-out laziness.

I am so apathetic! This is unlikely to change until I find some purpose in my life, or some fixed target to aim for. Which brings me back to the gradschool problem. The question is this:

Am I wanting to go to graduate school because 1) I don’t know what else to do, I like school and its culture a lot, all my friends are in school, I hate having a real cog-in-the-wheel job or 2) I’d really like to study physics/theater/literature/language (fill in the blanks) and believe that gradschool is the next step in my imagined ideal career?

As much as I hope for the latter, it’s quite clearly the former right now. One main reason being I can’t quite decide what I want to do in life. I’m having problems narrowing down the boundaries to encompass some small related grouping of fields that gives me enough flexibility to play with my interests but enough specialization that I can actually find some sort of training for it.

One always hears that if you like too many things, you have to give up some of them in order to move forward. Playing with possibilities is great, but only one possibility becomes reality. Right now I’m a clump of superpositioned photons waiting for the wave function to collapse. Waiting, and realizing that it isn’t going to happen unless I choose to myself.

Gone are the days of an easy structured path, from school to school up the academic ladder. If I have already (and indeed I have, pretty unconsciously, but quite certainly) renounced the traditional way of good school -> job in finance/law/engineering/medicine -> accumulate money/house/car/husband/kids, then any deviations have to be self-marked, and consequently marked with uncertainty. How envious I am over those who have some vested faith in an absolute belief! But fundamentally, I think I distrust that more than anything else. Maybe I like it the hard way, having to make choices and carve out a path. And I might end up in the same place as everyone else but at least I was the one who walked along the path, wide awake.

Or maybe I’m a passive-aggressive control freak, patching together a destiny, Frankenstein-style.

Scary thought.

I’ll believe I’m just confused, and am allowed to be confused for a few years more. In the meantime, I really ought to check out more grad schools.

Cheers!