Do you ever get the feeling that you're lying crosswise to the world? I think that's a Pratchett quote, but it's an apt way to describe the wrenching disconnect of etching samples in lab while the rest of the country watches the Super Bowl, or parties on a Saturday night, or celebrates Christmas while you're on a plane somewhere over Nebraska. I admit that these have individually been voluntary decisions on my part - I went to lab today so I could go skiing tomorrow when the resorts open up after getting a few feet of snow over the weekend - but nonetheless the disconnect is real, and not voluntary.
The other day S was telling me about his latest project, and how he'd been rooting around online and had gotten a bunch of books from the library to do a bit of research. I sort of abruptly realized that I couldn't imagine having time for things like that anymore; I've been living in a world where I do laundry on Friday nights because I can't come up with a better time, I buy lunch every day because cooking seems to mostly happen to other people, as does grocery shopping for that matter, and it's a luxury to leave the lab at 7 to go to the gym.
Of course, I know that it's just grad school, that it will end soon enough, and all the rest. But the end is almost worse: the jarring transition from twelve-hour days to unemployment, as I don't have time to look for a job right now. I'm starting to feel that the Berkeley world is pushing me out: my access privileges at a lab I never use were "terminated" last week, and the guards at oft-frequented LBL confiscated my "suspended" badge yesterday. I'm not a student anymore, I'm a netherworld resident on filing fee, no longer eligible for the bus pass I never used, nor the gym membership I did. And I'm four thesis chapters and numerous experiments away from a real ending, which is looking more and more like an abyss. It definitely makes me wonder what I'm working for.
I think there is a sense of profound dislocation that happens either immediately after one graduates or immediately before. There comes a time when the strictures of academia no longer bind you, and you realize that the only thing keeping you going are your own desires and internal motivations. At that point, one does begin to question everything.
This happened to me when I graduated from undergrad unexpectedly a semester early. Classes were still going on -- including some in which I had been a participant -- but I was alone and strangely no longer bound by any of it. It was truly an odd feeling, a kind of transition and "adulthood" I'd never experienced before. After a short time, I realized that I still did have my own little community of intelligent people, and that I still did have desires and motivations. (One of those people was the Nepalese head waiter at a campus hangout restaurant, with whom I had many pleasant conversations about farming using oxen.)
(Yes, I read the blog. A guilty pleasure...)
Posted by: Andrew M. | February 17, 2008 at 09:21 PM