Still nursing hangovers from a particularly beer-sodden Halloween night (pictured above), Ana and I grabbed dinner at the Dube after she got off work.
Ana, being a few years older than me, has beat me to a lot of the crises that plague the modern itinerant twentysomething. Like, how I feel like I'm losing myself in this town, with this graduate school lifestyle, fading slowly away like a snapshot in Back to the Future. And while my character is unchanging, it's hard not to feel defined by the company I keep, by the things that I do. And right now I feel defined by solitude and endless papers and textbook chapters. And the toxic guilt and anxiety from underaccomplished weekdays keeps seeping into my weekends, when I'm supposed to be reminding myself that I'm a real person. And I need Ana, not to tell me I've only got two weeks left and then I get a break, not to tell me it's only a year, but to nod her head fervently and say that she understands.
I'm taking Ana's advice to keep my brain in order: from now on, grad school is my 9-5 job. And I'm posting it here because maybe then, under the watchful eyes of the whole goddamn Internet, I'll finally start being accountable to myself.
2 comments:
Good luck with that. I've been trying to figure it out for the past 2+ months (already???), so let me know how it goes for you.
Oh, and the Internet doesn't work like that. It's the enabler, not the enforcer.
I feel like in a one year program, I can't afford a rookie season. But still, here I am, two weeks away from the end of this quarter and I'm still sorting it out.
Meet me at Ajanta in three weeks.
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