When you are in college, especially as a graduate student, every summer is a period of transition. It is sometimes restful, sometimes productive, and always tangential to completion. Whether it is classwork, teaching assignments, or part of the long slog through a thesis or dissertation, what was true in May will be different in August. If you jumped ship to find a better fit between your M.A. and PhD as I am doing, you have the additional burden of having to move and adjust to a new city and new department. Unfortunately, T.A. pay isn't exactly generous and doesn't provide for much of the year. So, I usually spend long portions of my summer breaks at home.
Since my mom's area of residence is bereft of decent females, summers in the dating arena are really more like periods of exile than anything else. Influxes of new girls come over the summer, but since they are moved in and ready to go out by the time that I get back, I don't feel like I'm missing out on all that much. Those of my colleagues fortunate enough to have a long-term relationship have many advantages in graduate school life, not the least of which is having a "home" that is where they need to be to actually accomplish anything.
I've never been attached to structure, discipline, hierarchy, schedules, or any of that other bullshit. Or at least that is how I feel until I find myself sitting at home waiting impatiently for the days to tick by so that I can get back to my life. Sure, I can get a little bit of work done here and there and I can catch up with my family. Yet, it is hard to feel like a real adult living a life of any consequence if you are in your mid-20's and having to spend three months of the year beholden to your mother's schedule.
Summer used to be my favorite season when I was a kid. That was when my birthday fell, it was when I could stay up late playing video games, and it was when I could reboot. Now, being forced to reboot is no longer as desirable as it once was. In the future, I know that I'll value summer breaks so that I can get research done or recalibrate my lectures, but right now, I'm in a situation where being away from school means being removed from my arena of action.
As a kid, summer was when I was in my element but now it is when I'm little more than a disoriented and disgruntled observer on autopilot waiting for a rather dull movie to mercifully end. Things still happen in these periods of transition, but I am not a primary figure. When things go wrong, I have no means by which to act to improve the situation. As an academic, I could not possibly be more out of my element when I am faced with the uninteresting details of mundane existence. Without texts to interpret or papers to write, my arena of action is closed. The skills that I developed at school, such as being able to give historical analysis, suddenly become irrelevant at best and a liability at worse if I try to seek out some intelligent conversation.
So, I'm thinking that I need to find ways to stay closer to my natural habitat in the future. When Ma Jian left Beijing to explore Buddhist sites on the outskirts of China, he eventually realized that he belonged in a place with bookshops, hospitals, and women. For me, when I'm not near a university, the bookshops don't carry anything I haven't read and there aren't too many women around who I can relate to enough to form a relationship. I've known it for a while, but I have been loathe to acknowledge that I feel completely worthless outside of my own sphere. Either that, or I am just trying to devise ways to avoid wasting portions of the best years of my life in Rural Fuckopolis. Who knows?
No comments:
Post a Comment