Five More Years?
July 17, 2010
My entrance into the Ph.D. program here passed pretty uneventfully. I got home from four weeks of traveling and opened my mail, and there was the letter that said I was officially a Ph.D. student. It was short. I called my parents and told them the news, and then I watched Gilmore Girls. Our department has been in an uproar over the past few months because the DGS is going to another school, so someone else had to take care of my application. I was starting to get worried because they hadn’t emailed me. Instead, they sent a letter, and I was a Ph.D. student for about 3 weeks without knowing it.
Now I know for sure that I will be spending at least the next 5 years in the northern Midwest. It’s not the best place to live, really, (I miss Virginia more than I can say) but I like this school. I am in a long-term, committed relationship with school.
I’ve been working on my research this summer. I didn’t get much done when I was at home, mostly because the home where I grew up is rather pathological and it is an extremely difficult environment to work in. Don’t ask me what I was thinking when I decided to spend three weeks there. Oh well, aren’t we all disappointed my lofty expectations at certain points in our life? But when I got home, I felt at peace, and I was reminded that this is where I am supposed to be and that I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else doing anything else. I got right back to work and felt really good about it.
This summer has been leisurely and productive, but I am ready to get back to the madness. I’ve never really liked summer, mostly because all my friends leave and I get bored with myself. I like having a schedule. I will say the opposite in October. But I know myself well enough to know that I like to stay very busy. I am excited for this coming year because A) I will be a Ph.D. student, B) I will be teaching a class on my own and C) three of my friends are living in my apartment complex. None of us have cars, so we will have a much easier time having our communal dinners, having communal study time, and helping each other out and going grocery shopping together. I hosted about 90% of the time last year too, so this will also take some of the hospitality pressure off me a bit. I love having people over and making food for them, and I love it when people feel comfortable enough in my apartment that they help themselves to things. But I also like being fed. We will be able to rotate meals at each others’ apartments. This will make some of the loneliness of living alone a little easier while still allowing me to have my own space and not deal with roommate issues.
In other news, I’ve been getting very strange headaches lately. They’re not really painful, but they feel like a pressure that covers the entire top of my head and sometimes reaches to the back. They make it very hard to read and think. It’s sort of like feeling dizzy without the spinning. They’ve been going for about two weeks now, everyday, and I’m beginning to really worry about what is going on in my head. I’m going to see a doctor on Monday.
