Brief jottings...

Confession: I should be writing my papers right now, but I’m tired and I’m officially finished with classes and I came home and had a cocktail too many. I wish I were blogging more; or rather, that I had had the time to do so over the course of the semester. I won’t lie and say that grad school isn’t rough—it’s a chaotic mess, frequently, scrambling to get through readings, trying to put together a coherent thought, a workable presentation, and now, a half-decent paper (or three, in the case of we first years). Class in and of itself tends to be exhausting; just getting through a discussion wears a body down. My brain is fried. My writing is muddled. My body is actually not too bad off; I walk probably three to four miles a day, just by way of commuting to school and back. But then, there are days when just putting a sandwich together for dinner is too exhausting, so you burrow in bed and read or pass out or do whatever it is you do in bed. There will be deeper, further reflections on this whole crazed semester once I’m actually through with it.

For now, I’m tipsy and a little sad. We had a departmental party tonight, full of naughty desserts, serious™ conversations, and more than a few awkward moments. But nonetheless, it was weird to say “see you next semester” to people you feel you’re only just getting to know. Anti-climactic, I guess. Maybe I’m just being mawkish; I still feel like a bit of a child in all of this. Most of the people I’ve gotten to know are real people, adults, who have lives on their own, incredibly separate from school. For the past three months, school has been my life, and my entire life in many ways. Perhaps the strangest thing to me has been that the most challenging experience grad school—thus far—is, in fact, what goes on outside of the classroom. Growing up; playing adult; trying to figure out what my place in this city is. Boston is a cold city in every sense of the term. And being locked away in my room, in a coffeeshop here, a coffeeshop there—I still feel somewhat alien here. I suppose, in short, it hasn’t been at all what I expected. In some ways, good, in others not so much—but I suppose that’s any experience, no?

Hopefully, I’ll keep up with this blog from here until at least the start of next semester, but I can’t promise anything until the eighteenth. I’ll be entirely hermited away until next Friday, churning out these papers, and then it’s off to Virginia to visit my loves for a week. I shan’t take the laptop, but will likely be tweeting from the phone. Until next time…

Also, here's what my bed looks like in paper-writing-time:



Also, here's my wild lion's mane--I haven't had a trim since I've moved here. Increasingly, I feel as if I should have been a Rossetti painting instead of a person.