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I Spent Four Years Prostrate to the Higher Mind
by jean at 12:39 PM on February 15, 2005
As with Chuck, here is my post which was promised to Anna. I'm sorry if I'm a little incoherent, as I have the flu.
I applied to a few graduate schools this year.
Right now I'm in applications no-man's land, where my applications are already in, but where it will be several weeks before I know the results. This waiting has really convinced me that school has no place in a normal person's life. When you're working, you know that you're tied in. If you're working this week, you'll be working next week and you'll be working eight weeks from now, too. But when you're working and have applied for school, you don't know what might be happening eight weeks from now, and you can't really plan beyond that. I would like to take a camping trip this summer and a trip to Massachusetts this fall, but I can't make any plans about either until I hear from the schools. I don't know where I might be living by September. I feel like my address is about to be decided by lottery. The uncertainty is killing me. I've been out of school for eight years, and I've gotten used to the rhythm of the business world.
What is that rhythm? It's one where days are generally just like each other, and life is about what chores you're going to do this weekend and where you're going to take your next vacation. It's not about whether you might be able to do chores at all if a deadline is near. I know that a lot of people have jobs which chew up all their personal time around a deadline, but there are a lot of jobs where you'd be pretty justified if you set your foot down and told your boss that work does not get to consume personal time, and if the company can't figure out how to operate with their full-time employees on 40- or 50-hour work weeks, they can shove it. I am just now remembering that you can't do that with school. Maybe I'm wrong. But as I understand it, you do what you have to in order to make the A. Period. Or... the high B-plus. I don't think that there is anyone to complain to if it takes you 100 hours of work each week to get straight A's. It's not like you can quit, and tell the dean "You know, at perfectly-respectable School X the students learn exactly the same amount with just 40 hours of work each week." There is no efficiency in the teaching biz. That's my revelation of the moment. The other revelation is that, sometime over the last eight years, work in the business world has made efficiency my professional reason for being. Uh-oh.
Anyways, those are my (woozy) thoughts. Your thoughts are, as always, welcome.
comments (18)
Jean, I don't get it. After 8 years, what are you after? I don't get the impression you're about big money. Enightenment?
by Anna at February 15, 2005 7:17 AM
Enlightenment. I'm a bit woozy as well.
by Anna at February 15, 2005 7:18 AM
Wait, when you have a job you are supposed to know from one week to another that you'll still be working there? I think I've got the wrong job...
by mg at February 15, 2005 7:52 AM
This April it will be a full year that I have lived in this house. The previous 3 years I have called at least 9 places home. Now i feel like it is time to move again, I am getting the itch in my fingers, the restlessness inmy toes, and most of all disparity in my thoughts. Perhaps i feel I "use up" everything around me over extended periods of time. Maybe I just have a fear of commitment. But not knowing the future isn't all bad. It is a lifestyle I have come to thrive on, and I find it keeps me interested and motivated.
by dominathan at February 15, 2005 1:45 PM
After hearing terrible stories from people who've been screwed over by grad school, I have no desire to even try. Stories of engineering projects being canned after 2 years (which means starting over) and tenure profs' not getting allong over thesis proposals and dropping straight A students from the program after they have been there 4 years.
Know what you are getting into. Find out for sure how long the program has been around, how many people actuallly finish the program, and if they finished on time. Stick with established peograms. School is too expensive to make a mistake.
I'm sure grad school can be a great experience. I hope you get accepted into the program you want.
by MrBlank at February 15, 2005 1:45 PM
"Stick with established 'programs' ..."
Where is spell check when I need it??
by MrBlank at February 15, 2005 1:47 PM
I hate planning, even for tomorrow, hate, the word hate is being used. When people ask me what I'm doing tomorrow, I ask them what they're doing this same day next year. Makes me angry knowing that I 'have' to be somewhere at whatever time. I've lost so many jobs because of the thought: "Fuck it, I just can't be arsed." Every job I've had in which my boss has seen potential, I make a point of looking particularly retarded so as to avoid the imminent promotion to greater responsbility, granted better money, but longer and more stressful hours.
I genuinely do get angry: I can't even plan a holiday. My friends have usually worked out where they're going by the time I get involved and these days you can book a flight one day and be off the next. One of my brothers has just come back from New Zealand, sporting a DVD of him bungee jumping, skydiving, and taking two flights as a passenger in a fighter jet. All with the music "Where's your head at, at at at..." He reckons he spent close to £7000 just on mad activities. His constantly repeated line to me when I ask how he affords shit like this is: "Why don't you get a better job?" He does it in the voice of the American Psycho, Chris Bale.
I hate planning.
by Ex Crimson Guard NCO at February 15, 2005 2:43 PM
I have no intention of ever getting a job that sports responsibility, if I'm being paid for my life, I'd rather be paid for reading a book on a night shift, or watching DVD's or writing on a laptop. Least I can almost convince myself that I'm only doing something I'd be doing anyway, but in a place I'd wouldn't normally be.
Everybody sees fit to warn me about state pensions going to be crap when I get old... Everyone I know has a pension set up. Maybe I am gonna be screwed... I just don't care enough to make plans for that future. Bah, anyway, I'm sure a fairy or something will turn up at some stage to give me what I need... I'm quite lucky like that. Always something there, fortunately placed, to fall back on.
by Ex Crimson Guard NCO at February 15, 2005 2:48 PM
Now see, ECGNCO, what you need is a job with responsibility that still offers the farily frequent Badsam/Friendster/Email/Porn time.
by snaggle at February 15, 2005 3:22 PM
Hmm, maybe a job with the British Board of Film Classification? I'd get to watch all the best porn and then ban it, with a laptop on my lap surfing t'internet as I trudge through the thousandth money shot.
I'm pretty sure the BBFC only employs people from generations completely out of touch with current trends though. So maybe when I hit seventy years old, hate everything, and automatically assume everybody but me is incapable of handling certain imagery... I'll be perfect for that job. :D
by Ex Crimson Guard NCO at February 15, 2005 4:39 PM
It's not so much planning things as dealing with the vagaries of modern life that gets me down. It's just all complicated for me. I know I need some kind of financial advisor, especially cuz I am kind of an heir, but I just can't face the prospect now.
by Anna at February 15, 2005 6:19 PM
You know, sometimes I think you are a huge liar Anna, what with your "I got the highest score on the SAT ever in my state," and "I'm some kind of an heir." But then other times, I'd believe it if you told me you walked on the mooon. You haven't walked on the moon, have you?
by mg at February 15, 2005 6:45 PM
Maybe Anna has walked on the moon. Get the financial advisor, Anna. My parents made a decent amount of money all my life and frittered it away on rental properties that were never rented and other bizarre stuff like that. Yes, like they're paying off three houses: two of them are empty and the last one they (and I) live in. All they need is for my dad to admit that he's a bad landlord and hire a property management company. I figure a financial advisor might have helped them avoid things like that. Well, if they weren't utterly wierd and unable to follow directions, even from their doctors. Just try not to get a crooked advisor. People with money use money very differently than people without...
MG, I guess what I meant was that when you're working, even if you suddenly have to get a job, you'll generally look for something in the same area that you're in. If you live in a big city, you can find good opportunities in the same city. But the schools that I applied to are in Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Diego. There aren't any better programs in Los Angeles than at the school I graduated from, but I hear that graduate programs hate accepting their own undergraduates. :-/
Blank, thanks for the good wishes! I hope I don't end up in a Ph.D. nightmare story... I'll definitely keep your advice in mind.
by jean at February 16, 2005 2:03 AM
The SAT thing is true, but I think it was a mix-up. And I stand to inherit 1/3 of this huge mansion full of fancy stuff.... that we'll owe major taxes on and can never sell. Then I'll really need an advisor.
by Anna at February 16, 2005 7:40 AM
Yikes. Anna, I think you will. What's the point of property that's not usable (I'm assuming), but which you have to pay taxes on?
I didn't answer your other question up near the top of the comments. I didn't apply to graduate school for any particular reason; all I want is to be able to afford an apartment, clothes to wear, and food to eat. There are many different ways to do that, but I have always wanted to do this one, even if it means more student loans and paying them off later. If I don't, I'm pretty sure I'll always wonder what it would have been like if I did! So I'm just going to do it.
by jean at February 17, 2005 12:55 AM
Good for you. Go for it. I just wanted to be sure this decision wasn't about money. That is the most vastly overrated thing (unless you happen to have none.) The deal with that house is, it used to be our vacation home but now it's my mom's home. My dad's buried in the yard. When mom's gone, she will be too. And me, and my sisters. That's why it can't be sold. Through some fluke of luck, Ian will eventually be the majority owner. He can then relegate his cousins to the slave quarters in the basement, as my brother did to us years ago.
by Anna at February 17, 2005 7:43 AM
Spend a weekend at this lovely holiday... Uh, mausoleum, uhm, home... You can't beat our prices. Book now!
by Ex Crimson Guard NCo at February 17, 2005 2:06 PM
Thanks Anna! No, it's not about money. :)
Your brother made you live in the basement? Was it just you, or your whole family? I guess if that house is the resting place for your family, then it will be worth the property tax.
by jean at February 19, 2005 5:19 AM