All posts in: grad school

grad school

14 Nov 2010

25 small letters

Dear Migraine,

Begone!

–

Dear Inventor of the Icy Hot Patch,

I want to do unspeakable things to you.

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Dear Avett Brothers,

I want to marry you. If you’d forgive my obligations to the Icy Hot Inventor.

I never buy albums, but I’m glad I bought yours.

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Dear Guy at the 7-11,

Thanks a whole ton for charging me a dollar six for a cup of ice.

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Dear Starbucks Doubleshot,

You are the reason I wake up in the morning.

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Dear Library Science Professor,

Please have pity on my poor grade and my only recently apparent lack of understanding of the material. I promise that once I get a real library job, I won’t attempt to do real research without assistance from an expert.

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Dear 1000 Awesome Things,

I hope you know that your blog is the #1 Most Awesome Thing.

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Dear Peachy Peach Pie,

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!

You are one year old today. We are so proud of you! Except when you bite us. You should probably start growing out of that soon.

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Dear Simmons College Administrators and Higher Ups,

Thank you for providing us students some useful accoutrement of learning, such as 400 free pages of printing each semester, copy machines that sometimes work, and food service stations that only charge you a quarter for a cup of ice.

However, I speak for the general student population when I request the following accomodations:

1) Said food service stations should have Saturday and Sunday hours. Much like the Graduate Student, Caffeine Addiction never takes a weekend off.

2) We students deserve access to staplers that are able fasten together more than 10 pages without the back page flying off and disappearing in our bookbags.

If you would like to use some of my tuition money for this purpose, I would readily encourage your endeavors. One credit hour should cover 75,000 cups of ice and 200 or so gold plated, high-efficiency staplers.

–

Dear Susan Warner,

Would it have killed you to stop writing after… oh… 400 pages?

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Dear Paper,

I see you have not written yourself in the past few weeks. I hope you will cooperate now that I am giving you my undivided attention.

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Dear NaNoWriMo Novel,

I’m not avoiding you because you suck… I just have other, graded things to worry about for the next few days.

Okay, maybe I’m avoiding you because you suck.

Sorry.

–

Dear Non-Required Reading,

I’m waiting for you. We will have six luscious, wonderful weeks together, soon. Your patience will soon be rewarded… assuming I can keep you from the clutches of the Boston Public Library for a few more weeks.

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Dear Sisters,

What nonsense are we going to get into over Thanksgiving? Let’s make a Nonsense Plan.

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Dear Carbon Monoxide Detector,

WTF?? We did not all die in our sleep, so it seems unlikely that there was ACTUALLY deadly, invisible gas in our apartment last night at FOUR IN THE MORNING. I hope you feel bad about freaking my boyfriend out. And after I woke up to the freezing cold after opening all of our windows, just in case? We are officially fighting.

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Dear Only Other Two Girls On Campus This Early On A Sunday,

Did you really have to sit at the table next to me to talk about your Four Loko fueled evening? Out of all the tables in the entire school?? Good grief.

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Dear Central Harmony,

I can’t believe you guys opened for The Blanks!

You guys are awesome, and I miss you all.

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Dear Roommate,

You are cool. Thank you for bringing me all the things I forget!

Also, you should probably know that when you are not around Lance and I spend a lot of time scheming ways to scare the crap out of you.

BE WARNED 🙂

–

Dear Boyfriend,

Thank you for going out to get takeout so I didn’t have to cook or take time away from my paper.

Also, I’m sorry I’m a basketcase 9 days out of 10.

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Dear Glee,

How do you make Autotune feel so good?

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Dear Running,

I am still waiting for you not to suck.

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Dear Weather!

Thanks for holding out for so long into the fall. Although running sucks, I’m starting to get cranky when I can’t go, and I’m not quite sure how to run when it’s under 40 degrees outside yet, so thanks.

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Dear Daylight Savings,

YOU!

You are terrible.

Take a hint from Weather and help me out by not turning out the sun before I can get home and get my running clothes on.

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Dear Andy,

I read one page of the book you sent me, and I instantly decided that I was not allowed to read another page until my required reading is done.

However, I did start watching No Reservations while I fold laundry, which is greatly improving the quality of my life.

So thanks for that 🙂

–

Dear Internal Bodily Temperature Regulator,

Seriously, what is the deal. It can’t really be 2 degrees in every room I ever enter. Yesterday, I wore a long-sleeve shirt, a sweatshirt, thick socks, and a blanket, and it was 60 degrees out.

Are you broken?

–

Dear Tomorrow Night,

I can’t wait to meet up. It’s going to be you, me, How I Met Your Mother, and some mad Speed Reading Skills. I might invite a bottle of wine, if you don’t mind company. Oh, and maybe this pie. Get ready. I’m going to blow your mind.

books

12 Nov 2010

19th Century Children’s Literature

It looks like I might make it to 100 books this year, despite the lack of novels on my class reading lists.

I’m not complaining, but every semester spent reading 7,000+ picturebooks (Spring) or 7,000+ page 19th century novels (Fall) takes away time from the Read A Giant Mountain of Books objective. Last fall, I was reading at least 600 pages a week, but those pages were divvied up over three or four titles instead of crammed into one Long, Long Book.

This is my first exposure to the glory that is 19th Century Children’s Literature. And this includes some obvious titles: somehow, I lived almost 26 years without reading Little Women or Tom Sawyer. How did that happen? I have no idea. I was probably too busy reading The Babysitter’s Club.

Anyway, I’m growing more accustomed to the 19th century cadence of language, the Boy Book and Girl Book paradigm, and the sheer force of will power required to make it through a phonebook sized novel with the tiniest words still visible to the naked eye, and I’m finding myself strangely fond of some of the stories.

Our professor told us that, at some point during our semi-chronological reading list, a book would click in our head, telling us “Oh, this is a book for children!” You see, in the 19th Century, children reading novels was A) not widely possible because a lot of kids were illiterate or too busy being poor or working on a farm, B) not enough of a money-maker to warrant a whole genre to themselves, and C) kind of anti-Christian and immoral. So those 700 page monsters were not really written for children, but for women who didn’t mind reading about a child protagonist.

This week, I’m reading What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge, and even after one chapter, I knew exactly what my professor was talking about. THIS was a book for children, and I was enjoying breezing through it this week, even while nursing intense homework assignments and other mental-breakdown type situations.

However, I am not quite accustomed to the 19th Century Children’s Literature Horror: the moment when you are reading when you realize exactly what craziness is going on between author and reader, child and adult, and society as a whole.

I’m breezing along with Katy and her appealing younger siblings. Katy is a freewheeling, Jo March type tomboy, who will obviously need some discipline over the course of the novel. I get that. So she gets on this tree swing, after her curmudgeonly Aunt Izzie tells her not to. Alright, so something bad is going to happen, since the narrator told me that the swing is broken. She’ll fall off, get punished, and then move on to the next chapter-long trial of her character.

I should have seen it coming, but I was completely BLINDSIDED when Katy flies off the swing and blacks out, waking up to find out she is at risk for some kind of SPINAL CORD INJURY, and must now submit to the 19th Century Medical Treatment of Laying Down in Bed, Immobile.

Of course, the doctor says 2 weeks, but the 19th Century Horror keeps her in bed for TWO YEARS.

Moral of the Story:

To discipline an unruly (albeit well-meaning) young woman, you must simply hobble her until she learns the patience, humility, and grace of a complete invalid.

Oh, Contemporary Realistic Young Adult Fiction, you are calling my name…. See you in January of 2011!

grad school

09 Nov 2010

NaNoWriMo Diaries: Day 9

Date: November 9, 2010

Day: 9

Goal Word Count: 15,003

Current Word Count: 13,556

Progress Report:

Folks, this is the point in the month where I start kicking myself for doing so little planning. Sitting down to write is mostly painful: the pulling words to pulling teeth analogy is feeling apt. If I had any idea what I was going to write when I sat down, I think the Opening a Word Document Anxiety would be alleviated.

But looking on the brighter side, I’ve met almost all of my daily goals since my last check up. I fell behind on Saturday – I forgot how the weekends can be rough for me. See: all of my homework that I never get done on my days off. This is a bad habit. I would really like to use this extra time to get ahead, because I will be spending the 24th and the 28th in the car, and the days in between shuttling around between friends and family, and then only two days to recover and finish.

Plus, oh, final projects and school.

I also decided to switch points of view last week, from first person to third. But maybe I’ll switch back. Because I can.

Thinking:

This week I’ve been thinking about two things.

The Zero Draft

I must have read this almost two years ago, but Laurie Halse Anderson wrote something on her blog that stuck in my head like glue:

My YA novels usually begin in my frustration with a situation that many teens find themselves in, something that makes me upset. (WINTERGIRLS = Eating Disorders, f.ex.) But I think that if I focused on plot first, the stories would never go beyond “problem novel” fare. To me, the most interesting element is character. So I ponder a situation, do a lot of character freewriting, and wait for a new voice to pop into my head and start whispering. I do not worry about straightening out the plot bones until after I have written a mess of a first draft.”

This is comforting for me, who is staring at a word document with multiple POVs, crazy plot lines and character relationships that seem to have nothing to do with each other, and no idea about what will happen next. But I’ve also been reading up on dramatic structure, and the takeaway from that research is that without structure, nobody will want to read your book.

But maybe, like Laurie does, I can take an entire draft – a Zero Draft, if you will – to figure out my characters, and in the next draft let them tell me what they really want to do.

A Glass Case of Emotion

This week was a big, fat reminder of how completely incapable I am at controlling my emotions, and how easily I let them sway my behaviors.

Last week, I was on a roll. I had this new scheduling system that was working out really well (shut up!), I was prepared for my classes and starting assignments early. I was nailing my wordcounts.

Then, on Friday, I got a poor grade on an assignment I worked really hard on. My professor’s comments were not terribly specific, and amounted mostly to “You need to change the focus of your research project.” This normally wouldn’t bug me – I’m not as big of a GPA fiend as you might think I am. However, 1) I worked extra-hard on this project, deliberately, and was not rewarded for my efforts, 2) The grade I received made it impossible for me to get even an A-minus in the class, and what was worse, 3) The project is ongoing, which means I still have another part of the assignment due, which apparently needs major revision and reformulation. And this part is due on Friday. Also, 4) hormones.

So yes, I was upset for all of those reasons, and suddenly, the insecurity I was feeling about my coursework seemed to trickle over to my NaNo Word doc, too. Anything that put me in front of a computer, really. And with the project deadline looming, and no clear work to be done to get a good grade, everything in my life feels kind of… crappy. I can’t really focus on anything.

This is obviously a problem, and it doesn’t just affect my writing. Even the magic schedule that was last week’s salvation is unappealing. I don’t know what to do about it, currently, except slog, slog, slog and try not to wish too sincerely for someone to put me out of my misery.

Feeling: Shitacular

Moody Author Photo:

grad school

02 Nov 2010

NaNoWriMo Diaries: Day 2

Date: November 2, 2010

Day: 2

Goal Word Count: 3334

Current Word Count: 2205

Progress Report:

In what will probably become a regular occurrence this month, yesterday I found myself with an entire, delectable day at my disposal, but far too much to cram into it. Insult to injury: I began my impeccably planned day by failing to set my alarm properly AND once I woke, found that I’d set my clock 10 or 15 minutes slow. Who does that?

Anyway, for some reason I thought it would take me an hour to write 1667 words. It did not. I spent an hour in the morning and then another before bed, but after such a jam-packed day, I fell asleep before I could get to 1667.

Not the best start, but I did get up at 6:00 a.m. this morning and pushed it up to 2205 before breakfast. Hurrah!

Thinking:

A very brief history of Jessica vs. Nanowrimo:

2007: Finished, with a novel that I still think has potential, despite some MAJOR flaws that make me crazy just to think about them.

2008: Tried a new POV and an off-the-wall setting, but did not finish, mostly because I contracted a feverish illness THE DAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING and yes, I still went Black Friday shopping, because I am an idiot.

2009: Thought better of taking the plunge, but did it anyway, resolving to intentionally write the stupidest story ever committed to words for the sole purpose of greasing my rusty fingers. After 10,000 words or so, decided that I didn’t have enough for my character to do for a full 50,000 words, and decided to invite two more narrators to the party. Did not finish, again because of an impossible Thanksgiving weekend, this one packed with two 16 hour car rides, numerous family obligations, a paper due on Monday, and A BROKEN LAPTOP SCREEN.

Aside from all of those circumstantial excuses, the only real difference between my 2007 success and my 2008+2009 failures?

Planning.

I went into 2007 with a plan. I had characters. I had plotlines for each character. I had little arcs for the relationships between each character. I had a structure. I’d tried out the voices of each narrator to make sure I could write them effectively.

So of course, I would try to write a novel in 2010 without much planning. I am awesome.

What I Do Have: two characters, a vague idea of an ending, an idea of their main conflict, competing plotlines (which one will win?), a setting, character sketches, and a brand new notebook in which to write all of this down.

What I Need: a solid narrative voice (yikes), a clear plan to get from beginning to end, ideas for scenes, an idea of what good writing actually amounts to.

So in addition to setting aside writing time, I’m setting aside planning time. Today, I spent 15 minutes typing up as much of a favorite novel as I could, into a Word Document (Try this! It’s kind of fun to look at whatever words you respect as they once looked to the author: Times New Romaned on a white background), spent 15 minutes analyzing what each sentence accomplished for the scene or the novel, and then spent 30 minutes brainstorming ideas to write about because… um… I’m already out and it’s DAY 2, PEOPLE!

Feeling:

Scared Shitless

Writing is really, really hard and really, really scary.

Moody Author Photo:

Stay tuned for more updates as the month FLIES by… and add me here!

grad school

29 Oct 2010

internet schminternet

I love the internet, but I’m pretty sure it’s bad for me.

You see, for every enlightened person who can manipulate the internet to make their life AMAZING, there is a person who gets sucked IN and can’t ever get out and I think that person is me.

It’s not just the TimeSuck factor, though. I’m perfectly fine with using the Internet to fill my recreation time. Even though it’s much easier for me to lose hours of my life surfing the web than it is to watch TV, I think I can limit myself with discipline,if things are getting out of hand.

No, what I worry about is this:

Let’s say I have a whim. Any whim. I would like to know which YA books are popular, for example, and I wonder how many of those books I have read.

So if I had no internet access, I would have to think about who I knew who might have this information. I could contact a librarian, or poll my friends, or maybe pick up a list of award winners from the library or a bookstore. If it was that important to me, I might do one of those things, but I probably couldn’t do it immediately. I would be forced to negotiate whether or not this was REALLY important to me, and where it might fit in my schedule. If I decide to take one of these actions, I would also strengthen my relationships with the people I asked, or had some kind of visceral experience looking at books in a library, or actually pick up one of those books, or whatever.

If I do have internet access, I stop what I’m doing and run to Google. I lose track of whatever work I was doing, I find any number of lists that are published by people I do not know and will never talk to. I print them off, and then I get out my highlighter and go through the list, indulging my anal retentive side, taking pleasure in marking off things on my mental checklist. “Check off which popular YA books I’ve read. Done. (Until I come across ANOTHER list of popular YA books, in which case, good thing I have 7 different colors of highlighter!)”

At this point, I’ve lost sight of whatever I was doing, of course, but that’s also not the point. I still believe that my brain is smarter than my Internet habits. I could, with focus and discipline, curb the distractions long enough to get something done.

What really bothers me is this: in that moment when I decide that indulging in whatever Whim it is that is Whimsying me, my basic, reptilian desire for the pleasures of instant gratification is satisfied, and my ego is satisfied, too. “Oh, look, I found what I was looking for! That’s great, I’m great, and so is the Internet!

And whatever self-centered, ego-massaging, personal maintenance task that struck my fancy? That process is glorified as well. I print off list after list of books and highlight line after line, thinking this is somehow better than the Life Without Internet option, or perhaps… oh… reading one of those popular books and judging for myself?

Technology is great. Maybe too great for me.

It’s too easy, Internet. You just don’t give me a chance to think.

boston

25 Oct 2010

keep your lamps

I’m starting to miss Regular Life. Life without schoolwork. Life without homework. Life without reading lists and syllabi and part-time jobs. I’m sure this is no surprise to anyone who’s met me in the past year, but this whole Moving Across the Country Away From My Friends And Family, Living With A Boyfriend For The First Time, Managing My Own Finances, and Starting A Quite Rigorous Graduate Program? Yeah, it’s really hard. My days are generally spoken for, and even when they aren’t, my mind is occupied with what’s coming up, what’s next.

I think a lot of people – especially academics – thrive in this state, when everything melts away except for your work. I think I could go places in academia if I could live that way. But I can’t. I am acutely aware of what I’m giving up, living like this, and it makes me miserable, even if the work is objectively enjoyable, the subject matter amazing. I can’t focus. I can’t surrender.

Oh, there are moments of joy, that’s for sure, and moments of giddy exhilaration about what I’m doing here, the life I’m preparing for, the opportunities I have. It’s all very thrilling, but it’s also very stressful and exhausting.

If I were better suited to this kind of work, I think, I would look at this unhappiness and think about how to change my work, how to challenge myself. Instead, I find myself trying to inject my School Life with Real Life whenever I can.

Yes, I will drive 16 hours to spend 3 days with my family over the holidays.

Yes, I will wake up an hour early everyday so I can just SIT and BE for awhile.

And on Saturday, we went to the Jamaica Plain Lantern Parade.

I’m not really sure why I wanted to go.

All you do is walk around a pond, holding a soda bottle lantern with a candle in it.

I had homework to do.

And the boys I dragged with me were under-impressed.

But it was within walking distance of my apartment. An it’s going to be winter soon so I should enjoy the outside. And there were a number of adorable little kid costumes to be seen. And yes, we bought a cool Pac-Man lantern.

And it seemed like Real Life.

Like something I’d do before I moved to Boston and entered School Life.

And speaking of,

Let’s be friends!

You can add friends on there… somehow. It’s kind of confusing, but add me! I respond very well to competitive little word-counter bars,

and with the School Life in the way,

I’m going to need all the help I can get.

grad school

21 Oct 2010

the busy day

Thursdays =

6:45 a.m. Up early enough to cook up a bowl of steel-cut oats.

This takes about 6 times as long as breakfast preparation should, but informal experiments indicate that steel cut oats ACTUALLY fill me up, as opposed to the following other supposedly filling breakfast foods:

– fried eggs

– egg + cheese sandwiches

– egg + cheese + veggie omelets (although these come close)

– high protein, high fiber cereal

– low fiber, low protein cereal

– toast with peanut butter

– regular oatmeal with nuts

So I cook my ridiculous oatmeal and read a little Ragged Dick while I wait.

8:10 a.m. Leave the apartment dressed and with enough supplies & food to get me through the day.

Opt to take the train, since having enough supplies & food to get me through the day means I am, yet again, carrying two overstuffed bags, and there’s really no room on a morning-rush bus for me and all of my crap.

Run for the train, burdened like the beast I am with aforementioned crap.

8:30 a.m. Get to Job #1 early. Absolutely no advantage to being at work early.

Commence working:

– sending email after email after email

– telling people after people after people that no, I know nothing about Study Abroad, I am sorry that somebody who I have never met has yet to hire a Director, I get paid 13 dollars an hour do you think I have ANY influence over the administration here? But you have my sympathy, I promise, and I will dutifully listen to your questions.

– printing things

– sending more emails

– fretting over research assignment. Is this qualitative? Quantitative? Exploratory? Descriptive? I hate my life? Questions of Theory? Phenomenological? Good gravy, just kill me now?

– registering for LIS classes. 10 minutes before registration period opens, realize that some major academic planning has not yet occurred. Frantically map out rest of graduate school career. Feel impressed when this takes 6 minutes. Sign up for two courses, plan to drop 1.

3:00 p.m. Leave Job #1. Head to library. Spend my single precious hour of free-time finding articles and books potentially pertinent to my research project.

4:00 p.m. Assume position at Job #2.

– Answer questions from First Year Students who do not know how to use the library.

– Answer questions from disgruntled PhD students who just need their articleokaythanksWHYISINFORMATIONNOTFREETOTHOSEWHOSEEKIT? I don’t know, man, I just don’t know.

– Answer questions from my classmates. Feel awkward.

– Update a wiki. Feel technologically advanced.

– Fret over Research Assignment.

– Read a Public Safety email reminding me to never walk around alone in the dark, otherwise I’ll get attacked like the girl that got attacked the other day.

9:00 p.m.

Leave work, walk alone in the dark to the bus.

Hopefully, arrive without being attacked.

Hopefully, don’t miss my bus stop for the third time in one semester.

Hopefully, I will figure out how to use the word “hopefully” in a grammatically correct way.

Hopefully, I will go right to sleep and dream of research designs and methodologies.

Hopefully, my cat will be waiting for me in a basket.

grad school

20 Oct 2010

thoughts on a semester

This semester is quietly sucking out my insides… just like every other semester of my life. It may be time to face a bitter, bitter truth: I love school, but school does not love me. I certainly get off on Going to Class, Taking Notes, Learning, Academic Conversing, Gathering of Questionably Great Ideas, and Canoodling With Literary Celebs, but school also sends me into a perfectionist tizzy. I read Penelope Trunk’s article last night and was fairly horrified.

Try having an opinion that is wrong. Tell a story that is stupid. Wear clothes that don’t match. Turn in a project that you can’t fully explain. People will not think you’re stupid. People will think you spent your time and energy doing something else — something that meant more to you.

weiorjowewjaewuuggrrrggghhh….

Anyway, I started to think about my pair of classes this semester. I have two most excellent professors who are both teaching highly inaccessible topics. Going to class is not difficult, but doing my homework is.

For one class, I get to digest stacks of articles on how to properly formulate and conduct research experiments that measure library use. Eight weeks in, I still have no idea what it means to “operationalize my terms.” I rewrote the problem statement for my semester-long mock-research project for a better grade, put some legitimate thought into it, made some changes, and got an extra .5 points. A pity .5 points.

For the other, I get to read once popular, now obscure, (always 600 pages…) children’s literature titles from the 19th century. Common plotlines so far include “I love my mother more than God! Waahh!”, “My father is punishing me for loving God more than him! Waahh!” and “Why can’t I read novels on the Sabbath? Waaaaaaahhh!!!” Finding anything to say in my papers other than “Wow, that book was bizarre” is surprisingly difficult.

But I’m still getting, largely, A-minuses. No, this former valedictorian is not an A student, she is an A-minus student. Thank you, sub-par public secondary education! However, despite my 18-years-and-counting proclivity for the A-minus, I always have this feeling that if only I could [fill in the blank with some random self-improvement], then I could get A’s.

I always enter each semester with the inarticulate goal to “Stay On Top of My Schoolwork,” but I have really no idea what that means on a practical level. Theoretically, “Staying on Top,” means “Maintaining Some Semblance of Control Over My Life,” but every semester, no matter how I play my cards, I end up partaking in the following behaviors that drive me out of my skin, send my muscles into recurrent migraine territory, send my energy levels to the ground:

– Starting papers the day before they are due.

– Coming home after work or school and collapsing onto the couch until I fall asleep.

– The Incredible Disappearing Weekend

– Coming to class without having completed the required reading and feeling like an idiot.

All of which have been regular behaviors this semester, no matter how much they induce the mania. Urgh.

But what bothers me most of all is that somewhere behind the mess of working and classes and vegging out on the couch, I don’t actually have time to do ANYTHING AT ALL. Nothing. Not my reading, not the kind of work that will get me that coveted A, and not anything at all that I typically find useful or entertaining or enlightening.

So I’m going out of my way to carve out chunks of time out of my day to just… be. I’m hoping this will a) improve personal morale b) increase productivity c) contribute to a sense of control over not just my day to day life, but my larger destiny.

In June, when I had 20 hours of work, 16 hours of internship, and 6 hours of class every week, I started waking up with Lance and having him drop me off at Starbucks in Brookline, or at the T so I could hop on the train and go to the Starbucks in Somerville. It was an act of desperation: the papers had to get written, and I discovered that I was more likely to work on them with two shots of espresso in hand, even if I had to hold them at 6:30 a.m. The habit followed me to this fall semester – before every large paper, it seems I’ve procrastinated enough to send me into desperation, and into Starbucks before the sun comes up.

But I’ve decided to reclaim the Early Morning at the Coffeeshop Habit for the forces of personal good. Instead of staying up until midnight with a paper only to revisit it six hours later, I’m launching a pre-emptive strike. On Wednesdays, when I only work 10:30 to 4:00, I can haul ass out of bed early enough to hitch a ride and then I can have a morning to myself to

a) Tackle that homework before it tackles back

b) Do something I don’t typically have time for, like spend an entire hour writing a really long, self-involved blog post!

So at least for a few hours a week, life is good.

And although I do miss my summer Somerville Starbucks, the Brookline Village location sure has more than its share of colorful clientele.

Today, I grasp at the edges of my manic life with help from a guardian angel.