Lessons learned?

I have very distinct memories of the experience of sitting down to write my Master’s thesis.  They are vaguely painful memories involving me not leaving my 10′ x 15′ studio apartment for long periods of time while I sat at my desk.  Over the course of weeks I sat “reviewing notes and research” which, as it happens, was actually quite useful, but still was just a disguise.  I had absolutely no idea how to begin.

Finally it got to the point where it was do or die — a full draft was due to my advisor in mid-February and if I didn’t make the deadline I’d potentially jeopardize my ability to graduate in May.  Some time in mid-January I said to myself, “This is it.  I will write something today if it kills me.”  It took me a full day of staring at the blank MS Word screen to eke out a single paragraph, but I did it.

Part of my motivation — honestly, the only reason that paragraph got written — was that I was supposed to go see a friend play that night at a club and I wouldn’t allow myself out unless progress had been made.  The crap had gone on for long enough, and it was time to get a move on.  That night there was a snowstorm and very few people made it out to see him play, but I was there.  And I spent half the night jumping uncontrollably around the practically empty hall as I burned off the pent-up energy that had been building all day.  Then, before I knew it, I had the 95-page thesis draft out the door, on time and everything.

I have spent the last REDACTED NUMBER of weeks and months writing proposals about my dissertation — for approval, for funding, all sorts of things.  Generally, I’ve got the cocktail conversation down pat and I can describe the project in different levels of detail, but the thing is that I haven’t actually written anything.  Not a word of actual, bona fide dissertation text.

Things are a little different now than they were when I was writing the thesis; for one thing, I’m not confined to a single room anymore.  Also, there’s no real deadline [yet].  And I know that it just isn’t possible to write a dissertation that quickly.

And oh my god this is hard.

But this is what I signed up for.  This is the rewarding part — this is the part that’s mine – this is when I get to filter through all the books I’ve read and films I’ve seen and people I’ve talked to and write something that no one else has ever written before.  And I’m back at the bottom of a massive hill, blank page and all.  In the last two days, I’ve written an entire paragraph (all of which was written about an hour ago).  I do have a certain amount of faith that once I get things set up, some skeletal form will start to take shape, but until then, I’ve been spending far too much time checking up on facebook.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow will bring clarity.  And focus.  And words.  Lots and lots of words.

Not yet, but I’m getting close

I found out recently that one of my fellowship applications is not being considered for funding.  This was pretty devastating for a whole lot of reasons, not least of which is the callousness with which the foundation treated the situation.

The third of my three recommendation letters arrived a day after the deadline, thereby disqualifying my file.

Anyone even vaguely familiar with academia will know that a day late for a letter to arrive is akin to having something come in a month early.  Academics are not known for their attention to schedules and deadlines and faculty are swamped with letter writing (and teaching and grading) in the fall; some professors are notoriously difficult to corral into letter writing submission, even though they know it’s a necessary part of the process.  This writer in particular, though, isn’t even one of the troublesome ones.  The disqualification of my file not only punishes the wrong person (me!), but also utterly discounts the time it took for my other two letter writers to write their [surely glowing] assessments of me and my project, not to mention the days it took for me to compile all of the application materials.

After automatically rejecting my application, this foundation neglected to contact me or the recommender in question — as far as I knew (and as was initially reflected on the application’s status) everything was submitted and was being processed.  I found out entirely by accident — by neurotically checking the website to look at my application’s status — that I had been rejected out of hand.

“There is no appeals process,” I was told when I inquired about what had happened to my file.  I have no recourse.

Pleas on my behalf have now officially been made not only by the recommender in question, but also by a trustee of this organization, who was duly shocked to hear what happened.  No one has ever heard of such a thing in academia.  Generally, the applicant is held responsible and accountable for deadlines; recommenders are not.

A scholar in residence at the library where I go to work came by my spot yesterday to express to his sympathy for my situation — word has travelled.  And when I was describing the shock and level of disconcertion (is that even a word?) during the afternoon on which I found out that this had happened he said, “Yeah, I would have been home, curled up in fetal position.”

Rejection is a ridiculously regular part of academic life, far more than most people realize.  You and your work are under constant scrutiny not only by anonymous committees to whom you’ve applied, but also by your colleagues and, good lord, by the students in every class you teach.  For a field that attracts the neurotic and perhaps slightly socially challenged, it can get tough.

So, yes, not yet, but I’m getting close.

Another line, crossed

About 15 minutes ago I submitted my first proposal for outside funding (so maybe not so much a line as a hurdle, I guess); the first of four.

Graduate student life is an amazingly mysterious thing — no one really knows or understands how we survive from day to day (and, frankly, most of us don’t, either).  But my situation is that I started a program in the fall of 2005 that granted me five full years of fellowship funding (“full years” in academics do not include summers), which includes tuition, health insurance, and a shamefully small stipend on which to live.  Five years is an incredibly generous package, but now it’s ending; sadly, my work will be nowhere near complete when June rolls around and the money stops coming.

This means that several months of this fall are dedicated to writing applications for outside funding — there are foundations, societies, and organizations that give grants that are meant to help graduate students finish writing their dissertations.  Each application is different, asks for an essay with a different focus, needs it to be a different length, and requires a different number of recommendation letters.  It is a very trying process, especially because failure means not only that I will have no income next year, but also that a whole host of academics did not find my project worthy of financial support.  Every level of academic competition only gets more intense — at each stage the pool of applicants is only more qualified and more deserving. But there’s something about this process — in the constant editing and re-editing of the same 1000 words — that makes me feel both more and less confident in wading through the dissertation abyss.

0 for 1

… and thus the annual hunt for Trader Joe’s gender-neutral ginger people begins.  Last year’s search was entirely unsuccessful (which makes me wonder if maybe they don’t exist anymore), but this year I have better, more frequent access to a brand new Trader Joe’s, so I’m cautiously optimistic.

No one has ever accused me of not being tenacious.

An epic re-post

Editor’s note: Ever since this was posted (actually, exactly three years ago), it has gotten the most traffic of anything else I’ve written.  Evidently, lots of people are just as clueless as I was about pomegranate seeds and scour google to figure it out.  In their honor, and in honor of the season, here we go again….

Who doesn’t like pomegranates?  Certainly, I’ve always been a big fan.  But I rarely eat them.  Since I went to a Jewish day school for elementary school, we got pomegranates every fall as part of holiday celebrations (we got carob, too, but no one actually ate the carob), and that was really where I got most of my fix.  My mother, ever the pragmatist, never wanted to buy them, because of the work (and mess) involved.  A no-nonsense woman, my mother is.  Pancakes for breakfast also often fell into that category, but that’s a whole different story.

So, yes, pomegranates.

Not only did my mother DEPRIVE ME of pomegranates, but I never even started buying them for myself because I just found them incredibly frustrating.  All those little seeds!  I got about a half-second of pomegranate enjoyment out of it and then would have to deal with the seed, which has always been bothersome to me.  Why does such a fabulous fruit have to be so freakin’ annoying?  I have no idea.  I gave up trying long long ago.

On Thanksgiving a few years ago (my favorite holiday, actually, celebrated with my immediate family and one other family every year) there was a lovely salad topped with a sprinkling of pomegranate seeds.  I sighed to myself.  Pomegranates had floated to the top of the American food charts, which was fine with me, but I still was wary about confronting them.  Such a total pain in the ass. But, like I said, “Who doesn’t like pomegranates?”  No one. Exactly. So I started eating my salad, trying to carefully get rid of the seeds without (a) spitting them onto anyone; or (b) having them get in the way of the rest of the salad.  And in my borderline OCD way, I had them lined up all together on the side of my plate, safely out of the way.

Halfway through the course, my friend turned to me and said, “Sara, what the hell are you doing?  Why are you spitting out the seeds???”  The table went quiet. “What do you mean, why am I spitting out the seeds?  They’re seeds. They get spit out.”

She laughs.  “No, you’re supposed to eat pomegranate seeds.”

“You are?  Really?  So all these years I’ve been not eating pomegranates because of the seeds and now you’re telling me I could have been eating them the whole time???”  The table erupts in laughter.  I try to eat one and crunch on the seed, but, honestly, I’m just not into it and keep accumulating seeds on the side of my plate.

I can’t get behind this seed eating thing.  I’ve tried, really I have.  This was at least two years ago, and pomegranates still make me a little sad.  Then, when I was in LA last month, I took home a few pomegranates from my friend’s tree.  She had far too many and insisted that we take some.  I took a few thinking to myself, “What a waste.  I’m never going to eat these things.”

This morning I decided to break into one and try it.  Either I’d open the damn fruit and give up or the thing would just sit in the fruit bowl from now til eternity.  Worst case scenario? I’d enjoy it.  So I opened it up, got all the seeds out and gave it a go.  It took a few tries, but I think I actually got the hang of how to crunch on those things and not get too annoyed.

Honestly, I can’t tell you how relieved I am.

My sordid past, on display for you

I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while, but I’ve always wondered, “Really, does anyone care?”  The answer is actually that NaBloPoMo stops for no one, so here we are.

These are plastic and rubber earrings, purchased in Corning, NY (I’m pretty sure), c. 1987.  They are part of what was, honestly, a pretty extraordinary collection of earrings and pins I wore in the late-1980s and early-1990s.  This pair (and a few others) were hard won through a lot of adolescent begging — love at first sight, these were, and I needed them.

For the curious, the earrings are 2 1/2″ high from top to bottom (not including the hook), constructed of a hard black plastic tube, push pin type things, and hollow purple rubber tube.

File under: I don’t know, just because

It used to be that meeting new people wasn’t stressful.  OK, well, that’s not entirely true — I’ve never really been so great with new people — but at least I didn’t have to hem and haw almost immediately.  The problem is that most normal people in the course of polite conversation ask this very simple question:

“Where are you from?”

For so many years this wasn’t a problem, but for the last five (at least) I’ve found it a bit problematic. You know, it’s a trickier question than it seems.  Do they want to know where you grew up, or where you currently live?  One of my family’s closest friends is a family that moved to New Jersey from Canada when I was still in diapers; the wife once said to me in conversation that it took her 22 years before she actually felt like she was from New Jersey.

Sometimes, if I’m really among total strangers, I just say “I’m from New York,” which is just patently untrue.  It’s easy and people know where New York is.  There were a few years when I could say that and it wasn’t even a lie, but now it just isn’t even close.  Sometimes I say, “Well, I grew up in New Jersey, go to school in California, and live in Western Massachusetts,” which is true, but which also is very confusing.  Obviously, this leads only to more questions that bring even more confusing answers.  I end up having to explain an extraordinary amount of my life story in response to a ridiculous little question.

But I’ve been thinking about this problem a lot recently, because I’ve been feeling particularly homeless, despite the fact that I have a home. I’m in a permanent state of transience, have been for a very long time, and it isn’t likely to end any time soon; I’m no longer from anywhere.  I’ve uprooted myself too many times, I think, and I wonder how many people feel this way.  I suppose I could ask a counter question:

“Where do you feel like you’re from?”

No, that probably wouldn’t work, either.  My solution is clear: now I will just lie.

My ice cream was totally smiling at me last night

Maybe I’ve seen those American Express ads a few too many times?

A dull blade

 

For all of my jaded, tired eye-rolling at many things precious, I really am a sucker for a flowering garden.

It’s surprising how hard it is to get a decent photo of a flower.  For as long as I’ve had a camera, I’ve been taking pictures of flowers, and even though I love them, it somehow feels a little cheap.  Or like cheating — it’s so cliche!  I can’t stop, though.  There is just something so peaceful about them.  But I think it’s even more likely that these pictures of flowers are a part of my five-year-old self that I never let go, even through the black eye-liner, red lipstick phase (and, oof, that was quite a phase).

NaBloNoPo, redux

Maybe I’m in a particularly defeatist mood tonight. It’s Sunday in the late-evening, it’s been dark for five hours already, and fellowship application deadlines creep ever closer. Plus, earlier today I undercooked an entire pot of eggs that were supposed to become my lunch for several days (after I turned them into egg salad).

But I went for a short run today — my first in probably at least six weeks — so maybe it’s not all bad.  Plus, now I’m not concentrating in a totally new place.  Still, I’m a little afraid to commit to NaBloPoMo.

I’m here, though, Day One.  No egg salad, that’s true, but I’ll still try to entertain you (or at least myself) for the next 30 days.