lessons

I realized the other night while talking to Di that one of the reasons I feel bad about going back to grad school because I kinda think it makes me a loser. Like grad school is full of a bunch of pretentious phonies who can’t get real jobs because they are too weird and annoying. And I am one of them. If I am honest with myself, I find my current employment humiliating and beneath me, which makes me wince even to admit. Am I really such a snob? Yes. I can’t help but feel that the past year and a half has been an utter waste of my talents (accuse me of narcissism if you will). Maybe I am useless. Not in a bad way…like a ruby or an orchid? Maybe?

I was thinking how glad I was not to be moving to LA. How afraid I would be. I told Paddy that and he told me that had the department been better or made me a decent offer, I would feel differently, excited and happy. I’m not sure. My priorities are a bit different this time. I recognize that going there would be a risk, which I don’t think I realized when I moved to Montreal for my master’s degree. College Town was the better choice, but at the same time, it seems so safe that I wonder what happened to my sense of adventure. Or am I extrapolating too much?

Hopefully it will all become clearer once I get back in grad school, because it all made more sense when I was doing that than anything I have tried since. I remember one of the things that I hated about grad school was how it made so many smart, interesting people feel small and inadequate. So many people are unhappy, which puts a damper on things. It never really made me feel inadequate–annoyed, frustrated and occasionally mistreated, yes, but I always felt like I would be able to do whatever was required. I hated Montreal and my university, but I didn’t hate the work that I was doing. Except maybe the darkest days of my thesis, but, now that I have distance from it, I can see that that didn’t even matter very much. Not being able to finish it in time, that extra semester, the horrible stress of it, makes no difference at all; I don’t even think it mattered when I was reapplying to school. In the grand scheme of things, it was not a big deal. That in itself is an important lesson. Anyways, we’ll see how much of this is bullshit in the coming months, won’t we?

I’ve had too much time to think since I haven’t been working very much. I talked to my recruiter yesterday and she said that it has been slow. At least I only am going to be trying for a couple more weeks; I have little patience left. I had been able to ignore my feelings, more like depersonalize the whole experience, but since it is coming towards the end, I am having more and more difficulty not actively hating the whole thing.