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So, I spent the weekend in Reno. And before that I spent Christmas and New Year's here in New Haven, largely by myself, and had a fabulous vacation during which I said I would go to work but really just sat around the house playing Warcraft and watching a TON of West Wing. And I got a kitten. She's a very tiny 11-month-old orange tabby whom I have finally decided to name Claire, although she was very nearly a Thomasina and a Guinevere. If I am not completely exhausted by the end of this post, I'll upload some pictures.
Christmas was great. I'm really glad I decided to stay here instead of spending it with my parents. I had a very low-key day. I cooked a turkey and had three of my labmates over, and we ate a ton of food and drank homemade eggnog and two bottles of wine and then watched the Emperor's New Groove. We also played cards and sat around talking for a while. I've got amazing labmates, and this is by far the best Christmas on memory. No stress, no pressure, no worrying about spending money on gifts people may or may not like. The week after was pretty similar. I didn't go into lab, even though I really should have. I think I really needed the time off (I think I could really use a decade off, after quals), and I didn't even have the energy to feel guilty about slacking (which is really saying something!!). I went cat-hunting for three days after Christmas and finally brought Claire home on December 30th.
For New Year's, Aaron had a couple people over, and we ate pizza and drank really terrible vodka and I learned how to play Guitar Hero. I'm fantastically bad at Guitar Hero. It was a great New Year's, and for the first year EVER I did not cry AND for the first year ever I had someone to kiss at midnight. It was great. Again, it was low-key and very relaxing and I just don't know why more people don't avoid going home for the holidays.
I went home on Thursday, just to spend this weekend with my parents and Elena, and we had a pretty good time. There was a huge blizzard on Friday and into Saturday, so Saturday morning we took Elena sledding, which really meant Phil pulled her up and down a small hill in a sled, while she yelled in her tiny two-year-old voice, "More? More?" Then she spent the rest of the weekend yelling, "No!! No!!!!" which we finally realized meant, "Snow," or, more accurately, "Please bring me a bowl of snow so I can eat it."
All in all, it was a pretty decent weekend. I had a couple of really good conversations with my mom, and I think I have largely decided that I'm sticking it out until the end of the semester and then I'm saying Screw You to graduate school and am finding something better to do with my life. I have no idea what that Something Better will be, or if I'll end up just taking a one-year leave of absence or a permanent opt-out, but at any rate it was neat to talk about leaving school with my mom and not have her tell me flat-out that it's a terrible idea and I'm wasting my life. We watched the series finale of Gilmore Girls Sunday night before I left and we both cried. It was a good bonding thing. I think we're doing better now.
Anyway, I feel a lot better now. Stuff with my mom is on the mend, my little sister is exponentially more fun than the last time I saw her and is clearly a brilliant little kid, I've decided I'm getting out of this miserable miserable grad school experience, I bought a cat, and I currently have a very good relationship with Aaron. I think my life is still in SERIOUS need of some shaping up and taping back together, but for this moment right now, I'm okay. I am not a trainwreck. At how many points in my life have I really been able to say that I'm not a trainwreck? It's kinda nice.
Also, I read Cary Tennis's "Since You Asked" (Amazon link) on the plane, and it helped. A lot. With life. And I sat next to a woman who had done fun things, like working on a farm in Northern California, and cooking in a lodge in Alaska, and picking things in Australia, and doing other crazy three-month jobs that pay virtually nothing but give you housing and food and a sense that you're Living somehow because you're actually having experiences and meeting people and getting to know yourself and seeing the world. And she's going to law school now, at 27, and she's ready because she's done all the other things and knows that it's time to have a career and she knows who she is and what she's going to do with her law degree, and I thought to myself, "That's so cool. I want to know that. I want to figure out who I am and where I'm going and take a few years off to do stupid things that make no money so I can figure out who I am and what I want and what I'd really do if I had a Ph.D. in Genetics or Biochemistry or Marine Biology or whatever." Maybe I really want to be a novelist, and if I spent some time working really crappy jobs maybe I would figure out that jobs are all really crappy and I don't miss science and what I really want to do is quit my crappy jobs and get published. Or maybe I would long to pipet things and pour plates and wait for blue colonies and smell the yeast in the incubator and run western blots over and over again just to get clean bands. But really I think it doesn't matter what the end conclusion is, it just matters that I take some time off and actually do something for me, because let's face it, I haven't really done anything because I wanted to, I've done a lot of things because they were practical. I started working in a lab my freshman year of college so I could get "lab cred," I graduated in three years because it was cost-efficient, and I came right to graduate school because it was cost-efficient and because I was told that taking time off would make me lose momentum, and I've stayed here because it's impractical to drop out of graduate school when GOOD GRIEF, everyone and their mother insists that the entire world will just magically fall out of the sky and into my lap and money will grow on the avocado trees in my front yard if I just stay on and finish my Ph.D. Well, that isn't going to happen and even if stuff might be better if I get a Ph.D., it just plain isn't worth how I've felt for the last eighteen months. I absolutely can't stand the thought of feeling like this for another year. So I'll stick it out until the end of May and walk with a master's (which still makes me a little nauseous, since I have all that work between me and the end of qualifying) because yes, that's the practical thing to do, and then by all means, screw practicality.
It's probably a good thing I see my therapist tomorrow. I seem to have kind of lost it over the last week or two.
I'm gonna go make some more tea now.
Christmas was great. I'm really glad I decided to stay here instead of spending it with my parents. I had a very low-key day. I cooked a turkey and had three of my labmates over, and we ate a ton of food and drank homemade eggnog and two bottles of wine and then watched the Emperor's New Groove. We also played cards and sat around talking for a while. I've got amazing labmates, and this is by far the best Christmas on memory. No stress, no pressure, no worrying about spending money on gifts people may or may not like. The week after was pretty similar. I didn't go into lab, even though I really should have. I think I really needed the time off (I think I could really use a decade off, after quals), and I didn't even have the energy to feel guilty about slacking (which is really saying something!!). I went cat-hunting for three days after Christmas and finally brought Claire home on December 30th.
For New Year's, Aaron had a couple people over, and we ate pizza and drank really terrible vodka and I learned how to play Guitar Hero. I'm fantastically bad at Guitar Hero. It was a great New Year's, and for the first year EVER I did not cry AND for the first year ever I had someone to kiss at midnight. It was great. Again, it was low-key and very relaxing and I just don't know why more people don't avoid going home for the holidays.
I went home on Thursday, just to spend this weekend with my parents and Elena, and we had a pretty good time. There was a huge blizzard on Friday and into Saturday, so Saturday morning we took Elena sledding, which really meant Phil pulled her up and down a small hill in a sled, while she yelled in her tiny two-year-old voice, "More? More?" Then she spent the rest of the weekend yelling, "No!! No!!!!" which we finally realized meant, "Snow," or, more accurately, "Please bring me a bowl of snow so I can eat it."
All in all, it was a pretty decent weekend. I had a couple of really good conversations with my mom, and I think I have largely decided that I'm sticking it out until the end of the semester and then I'm saying Screw You to graduate school and am finding something better to do with my life. I have no idea what that Something Better will be, or if I'll end up just taking a one-year leave of absence or a permanent opt-out, but at any rate it was neat to talk about leaving school with my mom and not have her tell me flat-out that it's a terrible idea and I'm wasting my life. We watched the series finale of Gilmore Girls Sunday night before I left and we both cried. It was a good bonding thing. I think we're doing better now.
Anyway, I feel a lot better now. Stuff with my mom is on the mend, my little sister is exponentially more fun than the last time I saw her and is clearly a brilliant little kid, I've decided I'm getting out of this miserable miserable grad school experience, I bought a cat, and I currently have a very good relationship with Aaron. I think my life is still in SERIOUS need of some shaping up and taping back together, but for this moment right now, I'm okay. I am not a trainwreck. At how many points in my life have I really been able to say that I'm not a trainwreck? It's kinda nice.
Also, I read Cary Tennis's "Since You Asked" (Amazon link) on the plane, and it helped. A lot. With life. And I sat next to a woman who had done fun things, like working on a farm in Northern California, and cooking in a lodge in Alaska, and picking things in Australia, and doing other crazy three-month jobs that pay virtually nothing but give you housing and food and a sense that you're Living somehow because you're actually having experiences and meeting people and getting to know yourself and seeing the world. And she's going to law school now, at 27, and she's ready because she's done all the other things and knows that it's time to have a career and she knows who she is and what she's going to do with her law degree, and I thought to myself, "That's so cool. I want to know that. I want to figure out who I am and where I'm going and take a few years off to do stupid things that make no money so I can figure out who I am and what I want and what I'd really do if I had a Ph.D. in Genetics or Biochemistry or Marine Biology or whatever." Maybe I really want to be a novelist, and if I spent some time working really crappy jobs maybe I would figure out that jobs are all really crappy and I don't miss science and what I really want to do is quit my crappy jobs and get published. Or maybe I would long to pipet things and pour plates and wait for blue colonies and smell the yeast in the incubator and run western blots over and over again just to get clean bands. But really I think it doesn't matter what the end conclusion is, it just matters that I take some time off and actually do something for me, because let's face it, I haven't really done anything because I wanted to, I've done a lot of things because they were practical. I started working in a lab my freshman year of college so I could get "lab cred," I graduated in three years because it was cost-efficient, and I came right to graduate school because it was cost-efficient and because I was told that taking time off would make me lose momentum, and I've stayed here because it's impractical to drop out of graduate school when GOOD GRIEF, everyone and their mother insists that the entire world will just magically fall out of the sky and into my lap and money will grow on the avocado trees in my front yard if I just stay on and finish my Ph.D. Well, that isn't going to happen and even if stuff might be better if I get a Ph.D., it just plain isn't worth how I've felt for the last eighteen months. I absolutely can't stand the thought of feeling like this for another year. So I'll stick it out until the end of May and walk with a master's (which still makes me a little nauseous, since I have all that work between me and the end of qualifying) because yes, that's the practical thing to do, and then by all means, screw practicality.
It's probably a good thing I see my therapist tomorrow. I seem to have kind of lost it over the last week or two.
I'm gonna go make some more tea now.
