OH HI GUYS! Been awhile. Sorry. You see, I was busy turning twenty-five and having Existential Crisis Number Infinity Googleplex Bajillion, because society has impressed upon my psyche that at this age I should really have it together, that I should NOT on occasion sleep until 11:38 AM just because I have nothing scheduled for the morning, that I should NOT watch the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy Extended! Edition just because it's raining outside, that I should NOT open a bottle of seltzer haphazardly in my kitchen only to have it explode in every direction like a mini Yellowstone geyser that sprays all over the tile floor and causes me to slip and clunk my head and issue a stream of profanities so vile that it would make the children of South Park blush.
And yet I continue to conduct my life this way, stretches of torpor punctuated with bursts of frenzied activity, always on the brink of fucking up and always saving myself with a final do-or-die Herculean effort. Will it fade with getting older, or am I terminally wired this way? And who are those sleek, perfect people who always seem so on TOP of things? The ones who wake up at dawn's early light to go running, the ones who systematize their existences like an Excel spreadsheet and work indefatigably towards their goals and never seem ruffled by the world? I hate them. Should I hate them? Is it all a construct? Do they have secret seltzer debacles too? Do they cry in the shower because they're boring and they know it? Hmmm. Things to ponder from my new platform of maturity.
Another reason for my blogging absence was School, which has monopolized my writing energies lately. So in an attempt to make this [poor, neglected] bloglet actually reflect its title, this time I'm going to report on my experience as a budding young schllolar! If you haven't notice, my past entries have wandered all over the damn place-- ballet, summer camp, 9/11, the Id-- and I can't promise that this one won't also end up in, um, Middle Earth or something, but hey, what do you have against Hobbits anyway? They're kind of like graduate students when you get down to it, kind of like me, fresh-faced innocents with kinky hair who bow down to grizzled older men of great erudition and strong mystical female figures. Oh we Hobbits, mere children on a veritable suicide mission, caught up in the inexorable currents of [methodological] wars and [departmental] feuds, tramping across treacherous terrain against all odds only, at the end, to cast ourselves into a fiery crucible [of the job market and the publishing world]. And there's something about towers in this whole metaphor, too. You know, the Two Towers... the Ivory tower gone dark... evil flaming all-seeing eye of... your dissertation adviser? No? Too far? Did I kill the joke? Was there even a joke to begin with, or did I just brand myself a social pariah for all time by invoking Tolkien and graduate study in the same paragraph? Or are those things so profoundly uncool that they are cool now, like how communism and fascism eventually BECOME one another other on the political spectrum when carried out to their extremes even though they stem from opposite ideologies? I can't keep up.
Okay, okay, so my grad studentish life to date has involved precious few Orcs, giant flesh-eating spiders, Dark Lords, or sociopathic sub-humans. PUNY, as I will call it, is a friendlier place than I was anticipating, although it's not exactly your typical collegiate experience. It's located in the grittiest, most urrrrrban part of Schmanhattan, and "campus" is actually a converted department store building from the late nineteenth century. You have to get frisked by a security guard to get in. Nowhere to be found are verdant quads, leafy alcoves, statues of the university founders, or gaggles of undergrads. But did I mention how I don't mind any of this at all, because I HAD your typical collegiate experience for seven years and grew thoroughly sick of it, the cocoon, the holding pen, the entitled, lackadaisical students just waiting for life to really begin?
You're reading this and thinking, poor Alana. As a doctoral student, she's in the exact same boat and doesn't even know it yet. She'll wake up one day at the age of thirty-three and be like, "Whaaa-- wh-- what happened to my golden years? I guess... I wasted them all between the library and the shitty yuppie bar around the corner that I went to with some regularity to anaesthetize the nagging fear that what I was doing had no bearing on the real world and would not even result in material gains and meanwhile all of my peers had passed me by and were buying houses in the suburbs and producing offspring and smugly colluding on the secrets of adult life. Whoops should have thought that one through a little better."
THIS MAY HAVE HAPPENED had I attended another university-- perhaps, hmmmm, a private, more moneyed one that thought rather highly of itself, or one housed in a small sequestered hamlet of a town. Then it would be easier to dissociate from reality and suffer delusions of grandeur about my Very Important Intellectual Mission and eventually crack up. But PUNY, located as it is in the congested clusterfuck center of modern life and being as it is a public institution with a minor inferiority complex, seems designed to combat these tendencies. The faculty that I've encountered so far have been refreshingly honest about what it takes to become an academic these days. It's not just an extension of college, a protracted frat party, a leisurely lounge with a few Great Books. You must go to conferences. You must write prolifically and try to publish. You must have a presence in your department, build positive relationships with your teachers, and network and hobnob with other prominent people in your field when you can. You must teach, mostly to support yourself, but you also must remember that teaching is actually not the most important factor in eventually getting hired. Sometimes you must put aside the research interests that are nearest and dearest to your heart to produce something a little trendier, a little more Zeitgeist-y. And then, at the End of All Things, you might still come up empty-handed-- you might get an adjunct-type job with low salary and no benefits, or maybe you'll have no prospects at all because there are far more PhDs graduating every year than there are open tenure-track positions and it's all a big Ponzi scheme and they exploited you for cheap academic labor during your student years but now you're done, used up, and you'd better look for an alternate life path with all of those, um, infinitely marketable skills that you were honing in the library stacks. OY VEY.
We talked about some of these issues last winter in my interview before I'd even been accepted to PUNY. "Why do you want to get a PhD in Schmoozicology in this day and age?" asked The Faculty point-blank. They probably wanted to determine whether I actually understood what an academic career entailed or whether I was some overgrown maladjusted school-addicted shut-in who didn't know what to do with herself and wanted more time to stall. The question threw me slightly-- what? they're not interrogating me about late medieval polyphony or eighteenth-century compositional treatises or postwar schools of literary criticism? they actually want me to defend THEIR OWN FIELD to them?-- but then I took a breath and said my piece. It went something like this:
"Actually, I really don't need this degree. I've picked up enough random skills over the years to get by-- I can play piano for ballerinas, for singers, for church ladies, for whoever needs it. I can teach lessons, tutor people in schmoozic theory, tutor people in writing, teach English as a second language. Whatever. I'd make it happen. BUT I have this weird, intense, obsessive streak when it comes to understanding music-- what makes it tick and what led to its existence in the first place-- and I also have this weird, intense, obsessive streak when it comes to articulating things in writing. From what I know of your field, that's kind of what it's about. If there is even a remote chance that I can make a living doing that, even just some of the time, then I will take the opportunity."
Apparently that was good enough.
I was telling the truth, too, and it's still my truth. Everyone needs a fortress against chaos and fragmentation and apathy. For some people it's the organization, the Excel spreadsheet mode of life. For me it's complete absorption in ideas, a kind of deep contemplation that is directed both inward and outward, and then a creative act that arises from this contemplation. It takes me to this place where I've transcended my petty little existence for a while to connect to broader principles, and that's when I am open and receptive and maybe contributing something vaguely good to my small corner of the world. Even if it's just a single whole thought committed to writing, or two pages of Bach memorized and internalized and understood, or just a stupid blog post that I'm determined to see through to completion even though I can't quite find a graceful way to do that tonight.
