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May. 8th, 2012 01:51 pm"Don't apply to grad school," they said.
"It'll make you hate everything you think you love," they said.
"At least take a year off so you'll have something to look back on when you are mired in the abyss of your first year," they said.
"And if you do apply, it should be because nothing else can ever make you happy," they said. "Because you can't imagine any other career that would give you even the smallest margin of satisfaction. Because you know nothing else that will allow you to support your existence, at all, if you don't go."
I will never stop being proud of myself for not listening to them.
I am approximately twenty-four hours away from being done with my first year of grad school. In those twenty-four hours I have to write the last ten pages of a twenty-page paper and revise the whole thing so it's up to my standards, or at least so it doesn't attempt to argue via sentence fragments and bracketed colloquialisms and exclamation points. But you know what? I can do that while sitting in my bed in pajamas drinking hot cocoa, and without stressing overmuch. And this paper is showing me, more than ever, that there may not be anything other than grad school that could make me this happy. I'm only halfway done, but it already contains a section entitled "novels are people too" and a footnote about the use of "fan fiction" to describe eighteenth-century alternate endings to Clarissa and a lengthy diatribe against critics who disapprove of emotional responses to works of fiction as inherently anti-intellectual. Soon it will have paragraphs about emotional engagement with literary characters as an inspiration for personal literary production and the implications of marginalia for constructions of readerly authority and the validity of what Eve Sedgwick calls "reparative reading."
I can't wait.
"It'll make you hate everything you think you love," they said.
"At least take a year off so you'll have something to look back on when you are mired in the abyss of your first year," they said.
"And if you do apply, it should be because nothing else can ever make you happy," they said. "Because you can't imagine any other career that would give you even the smallest margin of satisfaction. Because you know nothing else that will allow you to support your existence, at all, if you don't go."
I will never stop being proud of myself for not listening to them.
I am approximately twenty-four hours away from being done with my first year of grad school. In those twenty-four hours I have to write the last ten pages of a twenty-page paper and revise the whole thing so it's up to my standards, or at least so it doesn't attempt to argue via sentence fragments and bracketed colloquialisms and exclamation points. But you know what? I can do that while sitting in my bed in pajamas drinking hot cocoa, and without stressing overmuch. And this paper is showing me, more than ever, that there may not be anything other than grad school that could make me this happy. I'm only halfway done, but it already contains a section entitled "novels are people too" and a footnote about the use of "fan fiction" to describe eighteenth-century alternate endings to Clarissa and a lengthy diatribe against critics who disapprove of emotional responses to works of fiction as inherently anti-intellectual. Soon it will have paragraphs about emotional engagement with literary characters as an inspiration for personal literary production and the implications of marginalia for constructions of readerly authority and the validity of what Eve Sedgwick calls "reparative reading."
I can't wait.