blueballs

chanced upon a friend’s old blog entry, and she has huge lofty dreams in academia. so do i, as people close to me would know. but mannnn, huge difference is that, she’s got everything all mapped out. grad school application, to-do lists and everything. she knows her dreams, which sound crazy, but then again wussy, achievable dreams are not much good are they?

i want a Ph.D. so that i can have a ‘Dr.’ in correspondences to me. so that i am enabled to write, teach and live somewhere where i am not forcibly conscripted, where the weather’s not perpetually a million degrees and where the crisp red autumn leaves, the first fall of snow and the spring winds are not just concepts i read about in poetry. and so that i am paid decently. is the pragmatism not depressing, especially from a literature major?

well of course i love lit too, but my area of greatest romantic interest and hopefully specialisation, the 16th and 17th century, is already inundated with canons and critics, and more papers published than a million middlemarches meshed together. people who know literature often point that out to me, and to them i confidently reply that ‘i shall maybe find a new slant on the renaissance’. that’s just smokescreen-speak for ‘i don’t know’, and i’m still waiting for that new great idea to hit me. someday.

and, grad studies is a bit of a luxury as far as my family is concerned. i have access to rather moderate means, and perhaps unexceptional ‘expectations’ (heh heh), but i highly doubt i could get through grad school in some nice glamourous country without at least some self-funding. so i’ve got to make my own way, and half-kowtow to my government paymasters (much as i hate this place). as we speak i have some tiny amounts of money invested in some managed funds, for the express interest of saving for grad school. it sucks to have to fend for myself so young in life, but in a nice positive way it is also greatly empowering.

and these days i live with the growing fear that my life would peter out and be ordinary. just another one of those teachers who teach and hate their job, and return home, wherever it might be, to debts, to a whiny wife and mundane middle-class mediocrity.

or maybe it’s just that none of this semester’s modules really fire me up. last semester, i had great dreams, and really enjoyed myself. this semester, *cough* i could not even muster concerted attempts to finish a number of books. and so it is just one deadline after another, before i get my head up again.