Yesterday, it was brought to my attention that perhaps I’m not being entirely fair in my depiction of graduate life.  In fact, to quote the individual who precipitated this, it was mentioned that I depict the department as “some kind of Dantesian circle of hell”.  In light of this, I want to take a moment to clarify some points and hopefully make my motivations in blogging a little less opaque to people who may stumble across this and misunderstand my intentions.

First things first: I am extremely lucky and entirely blessed (by a nondenominational atheistic power) to be where I am.  I love my department and I love my university.  Despite the rants and ramblings that appear here all-too-often, I recognize that I am one of the few (the happy few, the band of brothers) who had both the good fortune and the chops to be admitted to a place at a prestigious institution such as Tufts University.  My department is small and I have never been (and will never be) reduced to a barcode (despite what the University healthcare system may think).  My professors are supportive and giving of their time and expertise.  The library is a bastion of useful resources.  The research librarian is smart, patient, and wonderful.  My colleagues are brilliant and unafraid to challenge ideas even if they think it will make them unpopular.

In short, though like anyone else I have bad days, I can’t think of a better place for me to be spending the next 4-6 years.

Next: I love my job.  Period.  It is challenging, stimulating, and incredibly fulfilling.  It is also extremely stressful, but show me a job that isn’t (and isn’t mind-numbingly boring).  My hours aren’t set, I don’t get to walk away from my desk at 5:00 (or even on the weekends), and I’m always buried in projects.  But you know what?  I wouldn’t have it any other way.  I’m a restless heart and a compulsive multi-tasker, being in a cube is absolutely mind-numbingly soul-suckingly awful for me, so I have chosen a vocation that caters to these personality traits.  This also means that I have chosen a vocation that I live with, 24/7, and in which I alone am accountable for the successes and failures that I face.

As I said, this is an extremely stressful situation to be in.  Oftentimes what this means is that my creative outlet (i.e. this blog) is a way to work through the everyday stress which I am experiencing.  I make light of the things that are upsetting me, I re-frame them in an entertaining fashion, and in doing so I aim for a measure of catharsis.

I do try to blog about positive things but on the whole I find that things which are going well are boring, and things which are going according to plan even duller.  There is nothing interesting about a plan coming together in exactly the way I expected it to.

What this also means is that when I have more work to do, the blog explodes into a downward spiral of hellish depravity.  In hindsight, perhaps I’ve been a bit too negative recently.

Let me assure you that, though I may dramatically recount my foibles through this completely cumbersome year, I am doing so with a grin.  My goal has always been to depict graduate life in a realistic fashion; the good, the bad, the velociraptors.  I don’t want to present a rose-tinted haze of nostalgia for one’s salad-years, but I also don’t want to make you (dear reader) believe that I live in a bookish hell of theory-demons in which highfalutin’ tweedy professors flog me day in and day out with bad Hamlet quartos.  Neither of these things are fair assessments and both would be a disservice to my colleagues and my institution.  Rather, believe this:

This is the tale of a girl who had only some idea of what she was getting into and would like the rest of the world to be a bit more educated than she was when she decided that she wanted to continue her education.  She began the journey with a map but no guide and things which appeared one way often weren’t while things which appeared another often were.

I am Alice and this is my wonderland.  Fanciful, beautiful, fleeting yet all-too-real, perplexing and lateral, a place in which things I thought I knew vanish into sand and things which I am learning are life-saving skills, a place where my bourgeoning expertise is valued but I must always enter with a beginner’s mind, a place where I must leave some weapons of the past at the door and cling to others (but I’m not always certain which is which), and above all a place I wouldn’t dream of giving up for anything.