It feels like the inside of my head is trying to escape by pushing through the back of my eyes.

I guess this is to be expected, since it's been awhile since I've had one of my recurring throat/nose-sinus-y affairs. Although I would have thought that recent frigid temperatures would have, I don't know, frozen the germs, or at least made them sluggish, whatever. This is why I'm not a scientist.

Related question: should one be taken ill, but one's body normally functions only with regular infusions of caffeine, does one continue or modify usual caffeine consumption?

Iowa: eh. My preference for awhile now has gone Edwards, Clinton, Obama. I used to like Obama more, but for some reason he's starting to rub me the wrong way. Maybe if I read one of his books it'd make me feel better about his substance. Or I'll ask my policy-wonk friends to convince me. In any case, I am, of course, happy to have him a million times over any Republican. Duh. Speaking of, I don't know whether to be happy or horrified about the Huckabee thing. I had thought that if he by some anti-miracle gained the nomination, he would wither and die in the general election. Cause seriously--have we learned nothing from the past eight years? But it just makes me sick to my stomach to imagine another religious right victory. Honestly, I would have to renounce citizenship, flee to Canada, or something more drastic. I'm actually getting sad thinking about it, so I'll shut up now and distract myself with some DVDs and pills.

Done.

Application sent, fee waiver obtained (How the hell do you justify charging $80 to apply for admission to a training program for academics? Doctors, lawyers, sure, fine, I can see that, but academics?), personal statement beaten into submission by compulsive editing, yep, looks like I covered everything. And now my sleep schedule's so turned around that it's 4:45 in the morning, and I'm really not tired at all. Time to play around on eBay.

Snowed in

Locked in my apartment all day, working from home; it's just as well that I didn't even attempt to get to the office first thing, as when I attempted to go somewhere later in the afternoon, my car got stuck in the snowdrifts three-quarters of the way out the driveway. That was some fun times, friends. Thank god for friendly people on the street who know the right combination of pushing and rocking and shifting and shoveling to extract a low-quality mobile tin can from winter's detritus. I then parked my car as deep in the driveway it would go and settled back into my home workspace.

So. GREs are done, recommendations are done, transcripts are done, now I only have the some statements of purpose to struggle fruitlessly over for a few weeks. I was never a big fan of this genre of writing, due to my own problems articulating a clearly-defined set of research interests and projects. My questions all get so large that they lose coherency. Which is kind of a problem when you're looking to publish bite-sized chunks of inquiry and develop coherent projects and the like. You know, the whole being-an-academic part of being an academic. Hm.

I do desperately hope that I'll somehow acquire this ability somewhat naturally (osmosis-like...) when I'm a full-time student again. I don't recognize "the publishable topic/paper/etc." when I see it, yet. I have a paper that I'm in the process of substantially cutting and revising for submission to a journal, on the recommendation of Adviser Guy. I wouldn't have thought of it as something publishable until somebody told me so. Re-play of a conversation from a few weeks ago:

Me: I don't know how to write something that's publishable!
AG: Well, this [the paper] is publishable.
Me: But I don't know how I did that!

So I guess until I figure out a process, "spirit possession" will be my process-by-default. I'm sure that's sustainable.

That's all for now. Many thank-yous to Sisyphus, whose lovely shiny blogger gift came in the mail on Wednesday.

Limbo + presents

I don't know what I'm doing with my life. Specifically with grad school, but the grad school I select (or the set of departments I choose to apply to, and when) has implications for other potential career paths that are important to me, not to mention for my current position.

My solution? Take a mental health day, and catch up on sleep for most of it. Yes, I am an avoider. However, I think it did provide some perspective. But I still have a lot of reading and thinking to do. And potentially scrambling to meet other departments' deadlines. Or potentially withdrawing my one application. Life is full of endless possibility, ain't it? Goddamn.

In other news, in light of Sisyphus's generosity, I have an offer to make to all two of you who read this:


By the end of the calendar year, I will send a tangible, physical gift to each of the first five people to comment here. The catch? Each person must make the same offer on her/his blog.


(And no, if fewer than five people comment, you can't come back for seconds.)

No, really, I am here.

I just have been too exhausted and busy most of the time to be interesting. (And that is the only reason for my ever not being interesting cough)

Hey, so it's October, isn't it? I should get on with taking that ol' GRE exam, shouldn't I now? Which means I should start knowing what words like "sedulous" mean. And how to, um, do geometry.

I'm now having second thoughts about applying only to one grad program. I think I'm getting sick of this university, even though I'm not even an undergraduate here anymore. I hope these feelings pass, a process which I plan to aid by ignoring said feelings completely. La la la, can't hear you, doubt!

Oh, and also, I'm getting my wisdom teeth out next week. I'm ambivalent, as even though I know sweet sweet drugs wait for me on the other side, I'm probably not going to be so good for personal-statement-writing for awhile if I'm in a Vicodin haze. Though I'm willing to be convinced otherwise.

Are the Chronicle blog titles always this tongue-in-cheek/ironic?

Or is it just a bad day?

Princeton Gives Top Marks to Its 3-Year-Old Policy to Control Grade Inflation

Thanks to Colleges, Students Just as Ignorant as They Were Last Year, Report Says


In related news, I'm so glad that, due to my circumstances, I have a free online subscription to the Chronicle. I'm getting to cultivating my academe nerdiness/navel-gazing to an extent not previously thought possible. Look, I even used the term "academe."

In unrelated news, I'm sick. Ugh.

Pseudo-productive things I did today

(That "s" in the title is misleading...)

During a lull in work this afternoon (not so much a "lull" as an "oh my God I CANNOT read/answer any more e-mails or I'll end up forking myself in the eye") I paid a courtesy call to Better Than U Grad School's online application. I took the opportunity to enter the contact information for my second recommender, Advisor Guy, whose assistant had just let me know that he'd be fine with using the website to submit his letter. I already had the go-ahead from Mentor Woman to enter her in last week, so aside from the (rather significant, natch) next step of getting said recommendations actually submitted, I've two down, one to go.

And that's where we have a problem.

My would-be third recommender, outside my discipline but quite relevant for my academic interests--and, most importantly, knows and likes my work--has gone on "deep leave." Meaning that she's not writing any recommendations unless prearranged. And I did not know this until I sent her an e-mail in mid-August and got an auto-reply saying as much.

FUCK.

I'm aware of how necessary it is for faculty to protect their research time, especially when presented with the opportunity to take a sabbatical--I don't want it to seem as if I'm not sympathetic to that. But, dude! AUGUST, and already no deal if not prearranged? Can't I get a grace period? A grandfather clause? I didn't even know for certain that I would be applying in this admissions cycle until a week before I e-mailed! (And I thought I was being good by asking four months in advance...)

All is not lost. She did write me a recommendation for something a few semesters ago, and I wrote a cordial and tiptoe-y e-mail asking if she might be able to find time to pull that out of the deep freeze and send it along, just change the dates or whatever. And, most charitably on her part, she did respond, though unfortunately to say that she hasn't been able to find it in her files. aaaaaaaaaaaaagh. So now what I do is pray that she stumbles across it before earlyish November, probably the latest I should be asking people for recs. (Unless any readers think otherwise...?)

This wouldn't be so bad but for the fact that she's basically the only person who knows me as an academic being from whom I haven't already requested a recommendation. I know other professors, in a few cases fairly well, but they have little experience with my work that was a) not mediated by TA grading, and/or b) the best stuff I'm capable of.

Presuming my would-be third doesn't find that old letter, I think what I'll do is schedule an appointment with Professor I've Assisted, From Whom I Took Two Classes, And Who Likes Me to talk more about my academic interests and plans for graduate work, and then hope that's enough for her to go on to write a compelling letter on my behalf. Although I accidentally saw a letter she wrote for me for another thing awhile back, and it was pretty "eh."

Of course, all of this probably doesn't matter, given that those first two letter writers are tenured members of the department to which I'm applying for admission--one of them actually being the guy I want to work with and have advise my dissertation.

Any advice, ether?