Wednesday, November 28, 2007

I Still Suck at Titles

This whole PhD thing really is like bobbing around in the ocean. Everything comes in waves: the work, the emotions...I guess that's life in general, really, but it feels much more exaggerated here.
I just had a period of a couple of weeks where I was going, "What the heck am I doing here?" It wasn't an existential crisis or anything serious, because even in the midst of it I recognized that it was a temporary state and that things would seem better shortly. It was just a combination of several things at once. Three weeks of really intense work, getting back a draft with less than stellar commentary, trying to figure out what courses to take next semester, which led to a host of other issues: What if I end up choosing classes that won't actually help me at all? What if I can't handle next semester's course load, assuming I can actually figure out what I'm taking? When in my life will I ever have time to work up some conference papers/prep for comps/study for my language exam? How am I going to afford to live through my next year of course work? It's going to be YEARS before I have this flippin' degree, and I might not get a job out of this whole process anyway because probably everyone has much more creative research and it's probably totally hurting my networking prospects that I like to hold my cards close to my chest. Hey, I remember a time when I wanted the degree for the sake of having it and didn't care so much about the job market. Ha, who WAS that person?!...

The funny thing was, even as I was stressing about these things, I was aware that most of my worry was based on tiny things that I was blowing out of proportion, so I had to reign myself back in. There's no way I'll ever be able to get through this process if I look at the big picture. The only way to do it is one tiny piece at a time, and I'd been doing good at the one-step-at-a-time thing for a couple of months, I just had to get my brain back to that point. I guess it's good that I have the ability to distance myself from, uh, myself, because it helps to put things in perspective.
So I was already in the process of getting onto a more positive wave, due to a combination of the much-needed Thanksgiving break and just general positive self-talk, when I got my midterm back today. Remember the midterm, the one that was killing me back at the beginning of the month? Well, I ROCKED that thing. 97. I got a 97! Me! From a professor that is notoriously difficult. I can't believe it, I really can't.
So today, I feel on top of things. I feel like I'm actually good at what I do. And if this feeling only lasts until tomorrow morning, so be it. I'll take what I can get.

And hey, isn't it fun that there's only about a month until Christmas? I finished decorating my apartment the other day, and it looks cute. I put lights on my balcony and windows, although I wasn't thinking about the fact that blue is opposite orange on the color wheel, so the orange streetlight right outside my window drowns out some of the effect of the blue lights I chose for my bedroom window. But I also have white lights and multi-colored lights on the balcony and other window, which show up very nicely, and the blue lights look nice from inside the bedroom and since I mostly enjoy my own light display from inside anyway, that's all that matters. My mom sent me an advent calendar, and the advent calendars for the dog and cat should arrive soon (yes, yes, I'm freakin' ridiculous and I have the most spoiled pets on the planet but I have a lot of nurturing maternal energy, I guess, and it has to go somewhere so yeah, until I have children, and probably even after I do, I will be one of those Crazy Animal Ladies who buys advent calendars just so her pets can have a treat every morning. Actually, I'm looking forward to seeing how many days it takes the houndy hound to associate opening the advent calendars with getting a treat. Since he started barking at the UPS truck every time we saw it around the neighborhood after only the second time the UPS guy gave him a treat, and since it only took him one trip through the drive thru bank to realize that he gets treats there, too, I'm thinking it won't take him long)
I just watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas on TV. I love all the Christmas specials. I usually miss them, but this year I've been doing pretty good, having caught both the Charlie Brown Christmas Special and the Grinch. The other two I always like to watch are Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph. The funny thing is, I remember looking forward to the Christmas specials as a kid, but I was also annually traumatized by 75% of them. This should come as no surprise to anyone who knew me as a child, since I was frightened to some extent by about 75% of my entire life. [Seriously, I started making a list once of things that scared me or made me nervous when I was a child, and I'd only gotten through about 1/10th of it before my mom said, "I'm glad I didn't actually know you were so scared of all of these things when you were little because I would have had to put you into therapy"] I eventually outgrew most of my childhood fears and now it's just funny to think about the things that scared me. Someday I'll post a list here and you can laugh at it with me. In the meantime, here are the things that scared me about the annual Christmas specials:

Frosty the Snowman: This one didn't really scare me so much as it just made me terribly sad because I couldn't stand the part where Frosty got stuck in the greenhouse and melted. It never mattered that the whole point of the song is that Frosty has to melt and will be back to do his magic again next year, I couldn't handle the melting. I went through a phase of a few years where I actually refused to watch this one because it just made me too sad.
How the Grinch Stole Christmas: The Grinch really is pretty freaky, right? What really scared me more than the drawing of the Grinch was the song, though. I found deep voices scary in general (I had several tapes with certain songs I wouldn't listen to because I deemed the voice too deep), and the combination of low, deep voice and slinking Grinch was too much. And since the song and the slinking is about half of the special, it was sort of a problem.
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: That old miner guy weirded me out. The Island of Misfit Toys made me want to cry. And the Abominable Snowman scared the heck out of me. This is the only Christmas special fear that my parents really remember me having, probably because for a few years I would leave the room in a panic when the Abominable came on. Now that I'm an adult, my sentiments have swayed the exact opposite direction, and I find the Abominable Snowman cute and lovable. I even have a hot chocolate tin that "Santa" brought me last Christmas that has the Abominable Snowman on it, and even when it's not Christmas time it sits on my microwave to make me smile.
Charlie Brown: This was my favorite. No real problems with this one. When everyone rejected the Christmas tree it made me a little sad, but not melting-Frosty sad.

The question is, WHY did I look forward to these shows coming on every year? I have no idea. But I did. Maybe it's because even though the majority of each one scared me or made me sad, I'd focus on the two to three minutes of the special that I actually liked. Which is a good trait, I guess. And a trait I really did need to cultivate as a young child since, like I said, until I was about 9, 75% of my life experiences scared me.

It's amazing I grew up to be as well-adjusted as I did. Haha. And that I look back on my childhood as an extraordinarily happy one regardless of all the irrational fears.

I leave you with ten things I thought of just now as I was writing this that scared me at least somewhat as a child:
1) the hobos that I imagined sat around a campfire in my closet after I'd turned off my bedroom light for the night [hobos, with red kerchiefs tied on sticks; it was 1988but apparently my imagination didn't know that]
2) my second grade teacher
3) owls
4) the voice of the weather machine on a tape I had that taught kids about weather
5) Alice in Wonderland
6) the power converter thingy around the corner from the house I lived in when I was little [I don't know how to describe it...like a mini power plant]
7) the masks that my grandma collected and had hanging on the wall at her vacation house
8) acid rain
9) several of the illustrations in my illustrated book of children's poetry
10)the cafeteria worker that called me mija

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