42 Dreams of Arizona Bay

Grad school is killing this blog. Or rather, thank Facebook and Twitter as accessories. Any random crap I would normally spew at my audience of four is directed to Facebook these days. (Dad, for the love of pete, PLEASE join Facebook so I can retire this blog.)

Anyway, I miss this blog. I may be interested in starting to post some of the random crap I find in my RSS feeds for lack of originality, and yeah, because I feel like I inundate my Facebook friends. Apparently I have *plenty* of time to at least skim my RSS feeds. We won’t talk about that, shall we?

So, mostly for my pleasure, I present you with something the internetz has served up on a tasty, tasty plate. (And because my blog template doesn’t like it, you will have to click into it. Sorry. I could probably try harder to fix it, but guess what? I won’t. Kthanxbai.)

Source: Online Education

I have to admit I’ve been a bit disappointed recently. A little disappointed in myself, and also disappointed in an opportunity.

No details, and I want to keep it classy. So no whining about specifics or saying anything on the internets that can be used against me at a later date.

Sometimes life sucks. Sometimes it’s sad. Sometimes we don’t measure to the goals we set for ourselves. Sometimes we don’t express ourselves well enough.

I don’t know what I’m doing right now. I’m strongly tempted to drop a class, to put me down to a more reasonable work load, especially in a quarter that looks pretty daunting. But the pathetic wannabe overachiever in me says, but you’ve done it before. And the pathetic realist says, but you can’t keep doing it to yourself. Look what it did to you last quarter. And for that matter, the quarter before that.

Is the race to the finish line really worth it? Is graduating a quarter earlier going to make a difference when I can’t get a job no matter what I do? Not in my old field nor in the new.

What am I even doing? I was excited to go to grad school because my brain had been allowed to lie dormant for so long.

But I think I decided I went to school because it sounded like as good an idea as anything else — anything to get off the sinking ship. Just like anything else, the decision wasn’t particularly well thought through. All of my major decisions have been like that. Why did I come to California? It was an escape. It was an adventure. It was most certainly not thought through. It was a happy accident on occasion, and other times, just a teaching moment. Don’t do that again.

I have some vague goals in mind, but I’m worried that I’ll never do anything. That I’ve made a colossal mistake.

In fact, you could even point to me going into journalism in the first place as one big colossal mistake. Why didn’t I choose something more useful? Why didn’t I go into computer science?

I suppose it was lack of confidence in myself. Which continues to clobber me to this day. And once I feel good about myself, just once, I get slammed down again. I’m not as good as I think. I’m not brilliant. I work too hard, but not hard enough.

What’s the point?

Another quarter of grad school is finished. With it, I am more than halfway finished with my studies. I have finished all my core required classes and am now just working on my concentration in digital libraries.

It’s amazing to think of how much I’ve grown academically in the last three quarters. Just about a year ago, I officially found out I was going to grad school, and I was ecstatic.

Finally, I would be learning again. I would also be working to learn a field different from the one that had claimed the last decade and a half of my life.

I don’t know what I expected when I started school. But I’m more comfortable and confident. I’m starting to make friends, or if not friends, certainly happy acquaintances.

After having lived in Sacramento for a year, I’ve felt pretty isolated. I don’t have any friends of my own up here, so even to be able to talk to classmates about what classes we’re taking next quarter feels pretty good.

It is possible, should I choose to keep up my grueling pace of three classes a quarter, that I could graduate in December. We’ll see how I feel about that in the coming quarter — it seems unfair to still be working so hard when most people take a break during this time.

I don’t have much of a break between classes — really just a couple of weeks. But I’m going to enjoy myself starting with a huge slacking marathon. No more guilt about readings or projects.

I’ve enjoyed all the intellectual stimulation — from learning about information polices and privacy, to learning about how to be a manager, to learning cataloging. It’s been great, and I think every bit of what I learned was useful. But I do need a break.

Shall I catch up on my missed Doctor Who episodes? I’m only two behind, which is actually better than it should be. Or will I watch a couple of DVDs I borrowed from the library? Should I go back to bed? Go to lunch to enjoy the freedom of just sitting with my Kindle (oh yeah, didn’t write about that here, did I. I told you I was busy!) and reading. Instead of worrying about the work I’ve been shirking.

All I know is it’s a lovely day, still cool outside. And I’m free, I’m free, I’m free.

I live in a household where one of us hates Mother’s Day and the other one of us will have nothing to do with Father’s Day, for similar reasons. One of us lost a mother very young, and the other of us, a father.

All the treacly wishes for today can often be ignored, until one or two or three little stings hit my heart. Like this snippet from a Salon.com article, Why I hate Mother’s Day. Posted, of course, through someone else’s Facebook:

I hate the way the holiday makes all non-mothers, and the daughters of dead mothers, and the mothers of dead or severely damaged children, feel the deepest kind of grief and failure.

And then there’s this, which sums up how I think people think about me. Because I don’t want to be a mother myself. I can name all the reasons. But that still won’t stop newly fulfilled mommies from lecturing to me about the love of a child.

We talk about “loving one’s child” as if a child were a mystical unicorn. Ninety-eight percent of American parents secretly feel that if you have not had and raised a child, your capacity for love is somehow diminished. Ninety-eight percent of American parents secretly believe that non-parents cannot possibly know what it is to love unconditionally, to be selfless, to put yourself at risk for the gravest loss.

The thing is, my mom wasn’t perfect. I miss her, but it has been 15 long years now. Long enough for me to temper the grief with all the bad things. It’s possible, if my mom had lived, that we would’ve spent many more years butting heads. That maybe we would have been friends eventually. That’s what I’d like to tell myself. We would come to some sort of understanding that would come from my maturity and the ability to accept other people’s imperfections. As well as realize my own.

I am still broken by my mother. I don’t want to be her, but I miss her.

So shut up with your fucking day already. I’ll be moving on to my dad’s day in June. My dad is a great guy, my buddy, and most of all, he’s still here so I don’t have to be sad.

Previously: I grieve and Happy whatever.

I’ve had a rough couple of weeks as I hurtled toward completing three lengthy projects for my second quarter of grad school. I daresay that I’ve been hard to live with, and I  know I wasn’t that nice one day at work last week. I haven’t been able to cook much, and every waking minute of my life focused around trying to get these projects done. Even in avoiding them, I spent too much time thinking about them.

So it was a lovely relief for me to finish my last final project to let it go into the wind and to say that’s finally good enough.

On and off, I kept crazy hours. This morning, I worked until 5 and finally fell asleep at 6. Then I woke up blearily at 8:30, realized that wasn’t cutting it, and went back to bed until 11. Ah, finally, sleep!

I then polished off the final draft over a few hours and immediately, yes immediately, crawled into the nearest bed with the nearest sleepy cat and passed the next 2.5 hours in happy, guilt-free sleep.

So this is why my brain does to reward me:

I dreamed of meeting and hanging out with John Barrowman of Torchwood, and of course, Doctor Who. I sat at a table comfortably with him and a handful of friends as we had beer together. Never mind I don’t like beer that much; I drank it for John Barrowman and toasted him. He was giving me lots of advice and I said, yes, that’s fine, but not practical. I mean, you’ve been on the TARDIS!

You can be on the TARDIS someday too, he says. Let me see if I can put in a word for you. Then an old-fashioned phone on a wall rings and Heather says, it’s for you.

I’m excited and hope maybe this is my chance to finally see the TARDIS — real or not, it goes back and forth in my dream — but when I pick up the phone it’s a recorded British voice. Someone has played a joke on me. Heather and John Barrowman laugh, as well as the rest of the group, but I’m not angry.

I go back and enjoy basking in the glow of blue eyes and a nice chat with John Barrowman.

Another part of the dream: I am walking along an old path that according to my dream, I knew as a child. It is green, it is mossy, and just over the edge of the hill will be an old village I’ve always wanted to visit.

It’s so beautiful out and lovely. And at some point, a childhood friend joins me as we get near the top of the path. Unfortunately, the way is barred by some ominous looking pumps and a sign to keep out. I remember this is a septic field of some sort and that someone fell into it as a child. My friend and I remember the danger, and how we almost fell in once. So instead of climbing up to the village, we have a comfortable chat on our way back down.

Despite a couple of moments of unpleasantness — including some minutiae I won’t bother you with — but the overall feeling I got was of happiness. I got a nice reward on top of a well-deserved nap.

I’m struggling with the dregs of my final assignment. All other unpleasantness is behind me. Just one thing stands between me and freedom for a week or two: about 1,800 more words and a critical analysis of the last month of research. Ouch.

I can taste the freedom, in the warm breeze that floats in through the open window. I can feel it in my tired eyes as I succumb to a nap or a few stolen paragraphs of pleasure reading.

Please, please, let this be over soon. Only to start up again in a little bit. But I just want a little time to myself, where guilt doesn’t linger at the back of my head, like an itch that won’t go away.

Writing a blog entry doesn’t help. Back to work.

It’s hard to be motivated to work on homework when you stayed up until 3:30 to do the last round.

It’s hard to be motivated when you’re entering the final week of the quarter and you’re overwhelmed. Sometimes it’s just easier to crawl back into bed.

Too bad that I dreamed about research when I finally did go to bed. You’d think I deserve a break. Too bad I didn’t get anything accomplished with this so-called research in my dreams.

I’m very glad to be almost finished with this quarter. I am going to need the paltry few days off between quarters to unwind. Then there’s all the things I’ve probably committed myself to. I need to work on this, that, and yeah, I have a book on alternative librarianship to read.

I think my biggest goal, after finishing the last of my projects, is to sleep in until I damned well feel like getting up. And watch lots and lots of TV. And take a drive. And get out of this damned house!

Wish I could crawl back into bed. It’s sad that my main motivation this morning to finish my homework might be the thought of leaving the house as a reward. So I can go to the bank and get my car washed. Yeah, that’s the excitement in my life.

Help…