3/14/2006

busy me

Last week of the quarter. Grading and writing. Too little time. Too much to do.

Took an hour off this afternoon and took the kids bike riding. Lovely.

Please send positive thoughts my way. I'm hoping to be a fair grader and a devoted grad student. Wanting to write an awe-some paper. Trying to make my research of the last six months shine.

Keeping in mind that this is what I've wanted so badly for oh-so-long...
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2 comments:

Gray said...

You guys are the best. What a nice pair of posts. The domestic image feels warm and familiar, though I feel slightly uncomfortable, like an uninvited guest.

I imagine you both sitting around the kitchen table working (or not working) away. When my wife and I do that it reminds of me young children engaged in parallel play. At home, our offices are connected and we can see each other through the open door. Sometimes our daughter is working too, and I can see her working in her bedroom.

The scene is both modern and ancient. I have an 1824 diary in which an ancestor describes a winter evening where he roasted chestnuts on the hearth, his sister did needlepoint, his father repaired harnesses and his mother worked on the farm accounts. Out cats are more likely to cozy up to the file server than the hearth, but apart from such romantic anachronisms, these family evenings are deeply similar.

I spent quite a few years either as a full time single grad student, and years later as a grad student with a full time job and a family. I remember the zeitgeist.

The pressures and anxieties of grad school do take a toll. Now that it is past I miss it, but I probably tend to romanticize it. Grading students bruises the soul. Today's seminal insight can become yesterday's wrong turn. Flashes of brilliance can be tarnished by gentle derision or indifference. It's not easy.

Yet you will come out the other side intact some day. I have read enough of your blog over the months to believe that. I'll send positive thoughts off to the other coast. Someday you too will remember grad school through a gently tinted filter.

4:38 AM
jana said...

Gray,

Thank you for your thoughts & positive vibes!

We have a most amazing kitchen/llving room/office table at our house. It's the biggest table we could fine and can expand to seat 10 comfortably. It is the hub of our house. At any given moment there are a few of us sitting at the table w/our laptops--each working independently, yet together. The cats often join us at the table, too--either walking tis length and rubbing on the corners of our laptop screens, or curling up in whatever chair happens to be empty at the moment.
:)

11:50 AM

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