Since last post (um, whenever that was), have attended each class twice. Going from one seminar and 2 proseminars to 2 seminars and one proseminar. This is a big leap, but the course on literary theory is just too fascinating not to want to dig in. It does mean ~52+ pp. of writing this quarter, rather than ~32 pp., and two oral presentations, but so it goes.
Though the reading has been part of the problem, there was also a hectic, heavily social beginning of quarter, including an all-day SD trip, and a sick husband. This biggest issue with the readings, however, has not been the quantity, but the media, specifically, PDFs. Oh, and my dept. doesn't cover printing for its fellowship people, only TAs (which begins next year). And the bulk of the critical readings for two of the courses (Faulkner & Chaucer)... PDFs. I haven't quite wrapped my head around how the on-campus printing works, but I have yet to replace the ink cartridges for our home printer, so I've mostly been reading the digital copies and not having any print version on-hand in class. This is not so smrt.
I'm building up to a system for handling this, but in the interim, bleah. I know it's all the rage to save the trees and have a laptop for notes and pulling up PDFs in-class, etc., but, well, that's just not how I roll. I'm all old skool with the taking notes by hand and scribbling in margins and underlining key passages of everything in pencil.
Other than that, I have a headache and one seminar left for the week. The one with the most PDFs. After that, weekend. I hope I can actually get on top of the reading for next week starting Sunday; until there is a paper at hand, I'm thinking my Saturdays should be reserved for maintaining that much-touted "work-life balance," which currently means leveling my orc shaman in WoW. Oh, and maybe some laundry. Trip to Target. That sort of crazy fun. Whee.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
Reading life.
Last night was Top Ramen with egg dinner, only the first of many, I'm sure. That's when I really, finally felt like I was back in school. I don't know that I'd had that combo since undergrad, while living in Irvine, which does make it a decade ago. I like to think that I've graduated from lentils-and-ranch to lentils-and-yogurt for cheap eats, but only time will tell.
Yesterday should have been my first seminar, but its conflict with the walkout/teach-in (@ a UC, yes) led the instructor to delay a week, with a make-up session to follow sometime later this quarter. I did not brave the heat and evil daystar for the demonstration, but instead did my reading. Middle English is not a fast read, generally. In class, I realized I definitely needed to give myself more lead time on readings (finish no later than the Tuesday before) in order to review everything again to develop some commentary. Even though I'm taking it as a seminar, I might do response papers for the first few weeks just to get myself into the swing of things, and ease the transition back into school.
Of course, I have readings to do for other classes, but now I have a pile of other potentially relevant works that I need to peruse to see if they have any insightful contributions to make to Machaut, Chaucer, Ovid, etc. Meh.
One thing I hope to get a handle on very soon is sleep. As in, doing it at the right time, for a long enough time. This also helps one brain better, as it can keep away the dumb.
Yesterday should have been my first seminar, but its conflict with the walkout/teach-in (@ a UC, yes) led the instructor to delay a week, with a make-up session to follow sometime later this quarter. I did not brave the heat and evil daystar for the demonstration, but instead did my reading. Middle English is not a fast read, generally. In class, I realized I definitely needed to give myself more lead time on readings (finish no later than the Tuesday before) in order to review everything again to develop some commentary. Even though I'm taking it as a seminar, I might do response papers for the first few weeks just to get myself into the swing of things, and ease the transition back into school.
Of course, I have readings to do for other classes, but now I have a pile of other potentially relevant works that I need to peruse to see if they have any insightful contributions to make to Machaut, Chaucer, Ovid, etc. Meh.
One thing I hope to get a handle on very soon is sleep. As in, doing it at the right time, for a long enough time. This also helps one brain better, as it can keep away the dumb.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Inauspicious Introductions?
1. First on-campus homicide occurred last Saturday. V. surreal. Off-the-cuff, it sounded like a DV situation, but, as always, the truth came out. It was quite a bit more sad and preventable than expected. That it happened during the first few weeks many new grad students would be moving on campus, and the weekend before the undergrads arrived, well, see title of post.
2. First day of classes is scheduled for a system-wide faculty (and grad employee) walkout. It's one thing for strikes to begin mid-year, another for it to be, again, a first introduction to university culture, or a particular university's culture. The university itself is an island of liberalism that stands in high contrast to the surrounding communities, which, while increasingly international in terms of represented cultures (Middle Eastern, Eastern European, South Asian, and East Asian, in addition to the WASP contingent), still consists of the largely conservative higher income brackets. Oh, and the buildings don't match each other the way the rest of the local architecture tends to do.
So, between the two, I expect a slightly more surreal start back to school than I'd anticipated. Oh, and I've confirmed that I really am older than most of the current Ph.D. students, not just the incoming ones. OTOH, my favorite TA from my undergrad years was probably the same age as I am now, or a little older, when she left her teaching position with a large local school district to start working on her Ph.D. Still, I think she's gone on to a career as a skydiving instructor, not a tenure-track academic, though there's probably a lot of personal reasons for this.
2. First day of classes is scheduled for a system-wide faculty (and grad employee) walkout. It's one thing for strikes to begin mid-year, another for it to be, again, a first introduction to university culture, or a particular university's culture. The university itself is an island of liberalism that stands in high contrast to the surrounding communities, which, while increasingly international in terms of represented cultures (Middle Eastern, Eastern European, South Asian, and East Asian, in addition to the WASP contingent), still consists of the largely conservative higher income brackets. Oh, and the buildings don't match each other the way the rest of the local architecture tends to do.
So, between the two, I expect a slightly more surreal start back to school than I'd anticipated. Oh, and I've confirmed that I really am older than most of the current Ph.D. students, not just the incoming ones. OTOH, my favorite TA from my undergrad years was probably the same age as I am now, or a little older, when she left her teaching position with a large local school district to start working on her Ph.D. Still, I think she's gone on to a career as a skydiving instructor, not a tenure-track academic, though there's probably a lot of personal reasons for this.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
First and foremost, I'm territorial.
As far as I know, I'm the only person I know using this intarweb name. Hence, I try locking it up on random blogging sites, becoming this inactive e-squatter, preemptively defending my e-name from... um... yeah.
I really have no business doing this, as I already have an LJ, a Dreamwidth account, and a Wordpress blog, on top of being about a week and a half out from starting grad school (to study English literature, written in English primarily by actual English people, not literatures in English which include American and other postcolonial Anglophone national literatures).
At this point, I'm dithering about my dwindling amount of Slack, wishing there were more time to play WoW, knit, read fluffy SFFH/specfic non-assigned books, cook random stuff (I have a week and a half to do fesenjan, Hawaiian-Korean beef BBQ of some sort, and probably a round of potato tacos, homemade style), and do half the other things I thought I'd do when I left my publishing job two years ago. Then again, applying to graduate school was as rewarding as it was nerve-wracking, and I expect more of the same from the actual experience.
Coming to the end of my long vacation is still jarring; I hadn't planned to be out of work for so long -- when we moved two years ago, it was right at the start of the recession, in one of its first epicenters (SoCal). A year ago, I realized I had no business doing anything other than applying to grad school. The worst that could happen was not getting in, having to reapply, and working somehow in the mean time. Instead, I got accepted at two universities, received solid financial aid packages, and ended up with a finite deadline to unemployment. Technically, I don't know whether it begins on the 21st or the 24th, but it's less than two weeks away by either count.
Now there's reading I should do in preparation for the reading I hope to do -- won't even really know what I'm taking until three days before classes start. I requested three classes, but everyone puts in requests for various seminars, and the department chooses the roster. The lack of control bugs me a little, though I understand the reasoning. But in the mean time, it's the push-pull between last-hurrah slacking and being-serious studying. There's even Latin to review.
Mostly, it's strange to start living an external life again. I've cloistered myself in the apartment for much of the time, playing with string, and escaping into other worlds via books or computer, making random dishes, experimenting with goat, oxtails, amaranth, and millet, as well as a range of New World, Old World, and creole-culture cooking styles, poring through James Beard, the Doubleday Cookbook and The New Basics, then consulting Diana Kennedy, Madhur Jaffrey and The Soul of a New Cuisine. I've got numerous scarves and given handmade gifts to show for my two years of exploring knitting. I even have a sweater for the cats to sleep on. My inner goth has been let out of exile, returning to Convergence, and has since found a nice monthly deathrock night relatively close (and affordable) to feed the soul. I haven't made all the progress with exercise that I would have liked, but being a student on a semi-regular schedule should help with that a little. I hear tell that the undergrads are scarce before noon.
Hopefully, I'll be a little more measured in my graduate studies than my frenetic overscheduling ten years ago. I am a little lazier and older. Still, I'm sure I'll be fine. It's just the waiting that's getting me all antsy.
I really have no business doing this, as I already have an LJ, a Dreamwidth account, and a Wordpress blog, on top of being about a week and a half out from starting grad school (to study English literature, written in English primarily by actual English people, not literatures in English which include American and other postcolonial Anglophone national literatures).
At this point, I'm dithering about my dwindling amount of Slack, wishing there were more time to play WoW, knit, read fluffy SFFH/specfic non-assigned books, cook random stuff (I have a week and a half to do fesenjan, Hawaiian-Korean beef BBQ of some sort, and probably a round of potato tacos, homemade style), and do half the other things I thought I'd do when I left my publishing job two years ago. Then again, applying to graduate school was as rewarding as it was nerve-wracking, and I expect more of the same from the actual experience.
Coming to the end of my long vacation is still jarring; I hadn't planned to be out of work for so long -- when we moved two years ago, it was right at the start of the recession, in one of its first epicenters (SoCal). A year ago, I realized I had no business doing anything other than applying to grad school. The worst that could happen was not getting in, having to reapply, and working somehow in the mean time. Instead, I got accepted at two universities, received solid financial aid packages, and ended up with a finite deadline to unemployment. Technically, I don't know whether it begins on the 21st or the 24th, but it's less than two weeks away by either count.
Now there's reading I should do in preparation for the reading I hope to do -- won't even really know what I'm taking until three days before classes start. I requested three classes, but everyone puts in requests for various seminars, and the department chooses the roster. The lack of control bugs me a little, though I understand the reasoning. But in the mean time, it's the push-pull between last-hurrah slacking and being-serious studying. There's even Latin to review.
Mostly, it's strange to start living an external life again. I've cloistered myself in the apartment for much of the time, playing with string, and escaping into other worlds via books or computer, making random dishes, experimenting with goat, oxtails, amaranth, and millet, as well as a range of New World, Old World, and creole-culture cooking styles, poring through James Beard, the Doubleday Cookbook and The New Basics, then consulting Diana Kennedy, Madhur Jaffrey and The Soul of a New Cuisine. I've got numerous scarves and given handmade gifts to show for my two years of exploring knitting. I even have a sweater for the cats to sleep on. My inner goth has been let out of exile, returning to Convergence, and has since found a nice monthly deathrock night relatively close (and affordable) to feed the soul. I haven't made all the progress with exercise that I would have liked, but being a student on a semi-regular schedule should help with that a little. I hear tell that the undergrads are scarce before noon.
Hopefully, I'll be a little more measured in my graduate studies than my frenetic overscheduling ten years ago. I am a little lazier and older. Still, I'm sure I'll be fine. It's just the waiting that's getting me all antsy.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)