"If" – graduate student edition

If – for Grad Students*

If you can keep your mind when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust your laptop with the I.T.,
But make allowance for a virus too;
If you can live sans sleep and keep your eyes from drooping,
Or, after three espresso, write your name,
Or, asked “how goes it?”, don’t give way to weeping,
And yet don’t look too crazed, nor talk too wild;

If you can chat – and not make Google master;
If you can think – and not make sense your aim;
If you can meet with “perfect” and “nice effort”
And treat the “but” that follows just the same;
If you can bear to read the words you’d written
After the three Red Bulls first hit your brain,
Or watch the drafts you gave your life to vanish,
And scream and hit restart and write again;

If you can make one heap of all your savings
And risk it on another stretch of school,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and hand and brain cells
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Deadline saying: “Git ‘er done”;

If you can talk with crowds whose grammar pains you,
Or read Bhabha – nor lose the common speech;
If neither B’s nor minuses can hurt you;
If all steps count for you in metered rhyth’m;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of papers writ –
Yours is the book and everything that’s in it,
And – no more – you’ll be a graduate my friend!

*Props to Rudyard Kipling for the original.

The Finals Countdown Has Begun

The Finals Countdown Has Begun

…and is so extreme that it requires caps to describe…

Remaining classes: 4
Class days left: 3
Writing Center hours to go: 5
Final exams: 1
Pages due: 52
Days until the end: 17

Let’s do this.

Paperwork Potpourri

Getting ready for international travel (this summer!) is akin to climbing a hill of sand trying to reach a beautiful scenic view, except that in this case, the sand is paperwork.

Have I mentioned that I don’t like forms?
Have I mentioned that this is not paperwork-filling-out weather?

Keeping the end goal in sight can be kind of difficult at times. And then I feel like an ungrateful wretch. You can’t win. Haha.

In the meantime, reading some one-act plays from New Zealand for fun, re-reading Macbeth, writing papers about women’s on-stage violence in the seventeenth century, memorizing lines from Dryden’s All for Love, and doing unpaid product tests on over-the-counter allergy medicines.

3 weeks and counting.

It’s Raining Pollen

Welcome weird spring/summer weather. Please stop raining pollen on everything. I need to be able to see to write papers, and Kleenex is pricey stuff.

The drug companies that make allergy medicines can’t be paying you that big of a bribe, can they? I’m sure I could match them if I took up a collection. (…beyond the obvious problem that letters addressed to the weather probably end up in Santa’s mailbag and merely give the postal workers a good laugh.)

If you keep this up, I will have to become smarter, as in remembering to roll up my car windows overnight to keep the pollen limited to the outside of the car.

That is all.

McDonalds March

I think (?) every graduate student has a “McDonalds month” now and then. March was mine. (Substitute your favorite stress-antidote, if you like.)

In a very sneaky, very perceptive advertising strategy, our favorite golden arches sent out a book of really good coupons in January … starting off with a no-strings-attached free frappe and going downhill into French fry land.

Before you know it, that side trip on the way home or “no time for dinner” run gets easier and easier.

In the midst of midterms, papers, and presentations, and faced with the impossibility of stretching time, my defenses were down.

Oh, McDonalds. Oh, comfort food. Oh, stress.

But that month is over. Your coupons have expired, Ronald; your time is up.

…

…

Chocolate, anyone?

Throwing (Out) the Towel

There are very few positive things about a stomach virus. In fact, I’m having trouble thinking of one. Nor do I intend to waste time trying to gross you out.

But last week, as I was recovering from one, I started to think about the defining post-virus moment, and how difficult it can be to go back to normal. It’s hard to say, “I’m better now.” It’s easier to stay in the house and leave the trash can close beside the bed. After all…

What if I’m not better?
Does it do any harm to be prepared?

Two harmless questions, right? and in this context, probably wise. On the other hand, when I practice the same mindset in other situations, they’re not so innocuous.

It feels safer to hang on to a few old markers of success and validation, to keep some of the old grudges around for ammunition in future conflicts. On a deeper level, it’s tempting to “be good” not out of freedom, but out of a fear that I might need that last bargaining chip to eke my way into heaven.

Not to forgive wholly, not to trust wholly, not to accept grace wholly. Just in case. Those three little words can be so insidious, and so destructive.

Just in case I’m not fully forgiven.
Just in case I’m not fully loved.
Just in case I’m not fully healed.

Why is it so hard to return the trash can to its place? Why is it so hard to believe that the virus is really gone?

Because there is another set of three words, one far more difficult to believe and, believing, far more difficult to stand on as I try to live freely and fully:

“It is finished.”

8 Ways to Tell…

Warning: dealing with sleep-deprived graduate students can be dangerous to your health, mental stability, and ability to get your morning coffee in a timely fashion. But not all individuals fitting this description wear a convenient neon sign. So how do you pick one from the crowd?

Eight Ways to Tell if You’re Looking at a Sleep-Deprived Graduate Student
(EWTYLSDG): In its acronymic form, sounds akin to “Eat With Y’all’s Dog.”

Which brings me to method number 1:

1. Internet Lucidity
If the general intelligibility of all electronic communication has disintegrated to the point that A) it resembles one of the popular internet tests demonstrating the unimportance of letter order for reading comprehension, or B) it is written in German, Swahili, and Russian, quotes Shakespeare, incorporates chemical symbols, and concludes with a promise never to do (X) (at the last minute) again.

2. Debris Perimeter
A minimum of four coffee cups, including at least one from Starbucks, either cookie crumbs or candy wrappers, two or more crumpled sticky notes, a pen cap with tooth marks around the edges, several napkins soggy with spilled coffee, a box of Kleenex, at least two books, a computer, and a pair of headphones within a four foot radius of the suspect. The presence of a blanket, pillow, or alarm clock is sufficient proof in and of itself.

3. Musical Selection
If the average country music star’s post-breakup album has fewer songs about death and misery; if the presence of percussion, trumpets, and other generally-accepted signifiers of judgment day and/or alarm clocks gradually increases; or, if the playlist itself is more than eight hours in length…and is set to “repeat all.”

4. Non-Verbal Noises
Moans, groans, and under-the-breath mumbling could be linked to a number of stress-induced conditions; however, only rarely will a non-SDG be heard to hum a song from the David Lynch film Blue Velvet or whimper in dactyllic hexameter.

5. Accessories
If the individual carries a backpack, strike one. If the individual’s backpack is bulging at the seams, strike two. If the individual’s backpack has already begun to rip along the seams and a book is protruding, back away slowly.

6. Walk
Being passed by the average turtle, punctuating each step on the stairs with a despairing sigh, or bending the upper body at a 33.2 degree angle even when NOT carrying a book bag are all strong indicators that you are looking at an SDG.

7. Cringe Triggers
-“out of coffee”
-“out of ink”
-“out of paper”
-“malfunctioning”
-“out of order”
-“closing time”
-“temporarily unavailable”
-“failed to save”

…and finally, the last and most fail-proof way to recognize a Sleep-Deprived Graduate Student?

8. Shared Experience
You have been awake as long as they have, because you’ve been working on the same paper.

Professional Development

Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. ~Gene Fowler

I’m beginning to think the experience of writing this particular paper should go down on my resume under the category “Professional Development.” If this hasn’t given me sympathy for the struggling writers I tutor and may someday teach, I don’t know what would.

When it Comes to Papers

Paper, go write yourself.

Somehow I feel very rude saying that. And yet if I were writing it in Latin, I would use the subjunctive in its optative sense: Paper, would that you would write yourself. Not rude at all.

Utinam haec charta se scribeat.

Je voudrais que mon essai s’ecrive.

Or something like that.

Argh. I like graduate school. Really, I do. Just not over spring break. Or on Saturdays.