My boyfriend--I won't name him, even though you all know who I mean (somehow it seems to jive with standards of so-called 'professionalism' to blog anonymously, and adhering to this norm lets me delude myself into believing I'd ever have enough readers for my blog to affect my professional life... plus this is not the most flattering story I've told about him, though it is funny)--My boyfriend often does not meet his goals. Let me not suggest that he's not highly productive and successful. Because he is. But he's also capable of astounding feats of procrastination, self-delusion, and deferral. These two things add up to the mystique of his spontaneous success, which though I find it irksome I have to admit has some basis in reality. The reality of naps, youtube, and facebook video games. And the reality of generally brilliant performance as a student. I know. It needs to be studied.
Despite his occasional (frequent) lapses into the unproductive, he always approaches his day with a surge of panic-induced optimism. Today is the day I do all the shit! (he says). But because of said lapses, he also occasionally (frequently) ends his day in a fit of remorse and self-flagellation. These moments are invariably punctuated by two phrases, said aloud, while muttering around the apartment at night, trying to collect the fragments of his lost time. "Tomorrow is going to be a huge day." And "I cannot have any more days like this one."
But on with the story at hand. A few nights ago I awoke around 4 A.M. to the sounds of my boyfriend talking in his sleep. He doesn't do this very often, and it's usually just like anyone else talking in his sleep: gibberish making border raids on the coherent. (Sorry, I couldn't help myself... everyone in my Weds. seminar gets that one.) He mumbles a couple of words that, strung together, start to sound like sense, and then there's grunting and a list of prepositions. You know how it goes. The other night was no different, except that he was particularly loud and enunciating particularly well. There was a certain intentionality to his speech, garbled as it was. I was about to go back to sleep when, amidst the babble one sentence emerged, clear as a distress signal in the noise, a cry for help from the subconscious: "I can't have any more days like this!" Dead asleep, his voice yet had the tone of resignation and panic that accompanies the lucid versions of this statement.
And then, before he once again sunk below the surface of coherence, he made two fists and flailed them about above his body. Not to this point have I seen such a powerful testament to the fixed and thorough permeation of our souls by the monster graduate school.
On a related note, two graduate student characters in a story I wrote recently have the following exchange about grad school:
"It's like paying someone to poke you in the face with a screwdriver and call you stupid."
"It's like being a prostitute and getting paid in I.O.U.s"
I hereby put out the call to finish the sentence, "Graduate school is like ______."
5 comments:
It's like paying the executioner to use a dull blade.
It's like pulling all of your own fingernails off and then trying to get the attention of the world to listen to how stupid you are, but nobody cares.
It's like taking a job that offers no vacation, no perks, no salary, no breaks, and bosses that do not know your name and will not remember what you say but "need to have that on their desks yesterday, thank you."
Graduate school is like a hypochondriac’s symptom: the more you complain about it, the more serious it gets.
Graduate school is like getting kicked in the groin by someone who's heart is clearly not in it.
Dubs, that might be the winner...
Bah, blast my grammar. Change that to "whose heart..."
Post a Comment