On ambition, feelings of inadequacy, and cross-stitching

I attended two defenses today -- an M.A. thesis and a Ph.D. dissertation.

Both went well, and both sufficiently impressed me. I thought both speakers seemed eloquent, articulate, professional, happy, and pretty much every other positive adjective. I was wowed.

Because I am shockingly interested in myself, I took these defenses to not only listen to my friends and colleagues demonstrate great work, but also to do some reflection about myself, and how I feel about graduate school.

I really like graduate school. I really, really like the program I am in. I like the instructors, I like my classmates, I like the freedom of the department I am in, and the amount of support given to me to explore my own scholarly interests.

But because I like graduate school -- and my particular program -- so much, I occasionally feel like I'm not focused on the result enough. I generally don't think about what kind of "adult" scholar I want to be. Sure, I'll think about how to improve my seminar papers, my comprehensive exams (about a year and a half away) and about what seminar papers I want to submit to conferences, but that's really it. The idea of not being a student and being a professional in this field terrifies me.

I've just started the program - so I have at least four years left of being in my graduate student cocoon - so perhaps this is exactly where I'm supposed to be.

But I do very often feel that most other graduate students have a personality trait that I am suspiciously missing -- a nearly insane level of drive, ambition, zeal. Sure, I have some ambition to be The Best Scholar Ever, but on a daily basis this ambition rarely sees the light of day. Just having the emotion of wanting to be a really, really good scholar frightens me. I could fail!

It's easier for me to function not thinking about how I'd like to Become a Really Good Scholar and instead think about I Need To Write 25 Good and Interesting Pages on Moses Mendelssohn. I'm very deliberately not seeing the forest due to the trees.

When I do have sudden burst of ambition -- when I feel that I should feel good about myself and think that I can really make it in this field -- I immediately feel so overwhelmed that I push it back down again. I then refocus my energy on other emotional pursuit, specifically crushes.

Once I was talking to an old adviser of mine -- an Arts Administrator (I have a B.F.A. in Theatre Management) and we had the following conversation:

"Well, the dating scene at the Jewish Theological Seminary is pretty weird. Nobody wants to date me. It's awful. What gives?!" I exclaimed, unceremoniously wiping some hummus from the falafel I was eating on my jeans.

"Maria, you just told me you were feeling so overwhelmed by all of your coursework. How do you even have time to pursue dating?"

"Well, I probably don't have that much time to date. But I always seem to find the time to lament my single status and develop intense crushes on people. I find the time."

I almost invariably find the time to sleep, relax, socialize, develop crushes on people, spend too much time thinking about feelings, blog, instagram. Other graduate students seem much more willing to sacrifice these things in pursuit of their ambition to Be A Great Scholar. (Especially sleep.) I'm only very rarely willing to sacrifice sleep, friends, or thinking about attractive people in order to have the best graduate school career I can have.

And on a daily basis, this usually does not bother me. I have a great life! I even recently became single again -- through my own volition!!! -- so this gives me even more time to think about my favorite topic, Why Don't More People Want to Date Me? Don't They Realize How Awesome I Am? and Once I Get a Really Amazing Partner, That Will Show Them All.

But then I attend two amazing defenses, and I feel like the wind is knocked out of me. The ambition To Be The Best Scholar Ever, generally so carefully guarded, came out.

I want to be good at this, I found myself thinking to myself. And I can probably do it, if I work hard enough. Some day, that will be you up there. You're actually pretty smart, you know, Maria. You can totally do it! 

So I came home. Did I spring to action on my papers?

No, I took a nap. In my defense, I was really tired.

When I woke up, I sat on my couch and thought about how impassioned I had felt about my studies earlier that day.

I can maybe do that, maybe I will succeed, I thought to myself. And then, immediately, No you can't. You're just lying to yourself. You're not as smart as those other people, and you never will be. You're a fraud. You shouldn't do anything today. You don't deserve to work today, you're such a disaster. It's too late for you anyway, you would have had to already read about 5,000 more books than you have read in order to be successful. My heart beat increased, I started chewing on my lower lip, my hands started sweating.

I irritably watched some television, and then picked up some cross-stitching. I started cross-stitching the word that best exemplified how I was feeling.

This will be a swear word, and as you can see, it begins with "F" and "u." I felt doomed.

While cross-stitching, I started to feel a little bit better. The rhythmic nature of cross-stitching is soothing, and I eventually began to think that I maybe wasn't doomed. I want to write a blog post, I realized to myself. There was a small voice inside of my head that said, This is EXACTLY why you won't and will never be a successful scholar! Successful scholars don't have hobbies!!! And you're going to blog about a hobby? That's a hobby on top of a hobby. How many hobbies you need? I hate you so damn much, Maria, but I managed to squash it down. Nope, I told myself, I really want to write a damn blog post. And it's going to be great.

And now I'm feeling much better.

I mean, all I really have to do this week is to finish writing 25 good and interesting pages on Moses Mendelssohn. Plus, I'm going to a state park with some of my amazing friends on Wednesday! 

Studyscapes: Week 1

I am still working on a few papers this summer. The work is enjoyable and I hope and pray that it is going well.

I have been taking photos of the scene in front of me studying, and posting them on facebook, twitter, and instagram (mariathemagpie). Commenting on one of the photos, I quipped that it was my "studyscape," and then immediately found the word cute. I like taking these photos. I imagine that in the future I will look back on them and fondly remember working on past projects. Or I'll think I was self-absorbed. Either way.

It's been really fun working at different places in Syracuse this summer. Most of the students (particularly the undergrads) are gone, and the campus area has this strange yet relaxing ghost town vibe that I also find very appealing.

This is me re-reading selections of and taking copious notes on Moses Mendelssohn's Jerusalem. I am at my favorite local pub and bar, Beer Belly. I am drinking a sort of strange Dogfish Head beer that has a lot of grape flavors in it. It's a strong beer and Beer Belly sells them in smaller glasses, but as you can see, I still had two. They were delicious.

This is me at the campus Starbucks, re-reading Altmann's introduction to Jerusalem. The nice thing about Starbucks is that they really crank the A/C up. It's probably like 67 degrees in there, which feels amazing after suffering in 89 degree heat. (I'm not good at being in the heat.)

I took this photo while at the Syracuse Bird Library. I was there not really to work, but to wait. The night before I had gone to Beer Belly with my good friend Emma to drink wine. It was fun. I walked to my home, only to realize that I had left my keys in my apartment. I sat on my stoop and considered sobbing, but I don't live in the best neighborhood to sit around on a stoop crying at 1:30am, so I instead walked back to my friend Emma's house. I spent the night at Emma's, and the next morning I grabbed my favorite Starbucks beverage -- a sugar-free hazelnut latte -- and then waited at the Syracuse library for my landlord to call me to inform me that he had victoriously opened my door. I obviously didn't have any of my books, so I somewhat randomly pulled some books off the shelves that had to do with Moses Mendelssohn. Then I read half of an article about Mendelssohn's view of ecclesiastical law and excommunication before my landlord called me to report I could return to my hot and humid apartment.

In conclusion, I like making these studyscapes. I'm going to take photos of them more, and will post more of them here. I will not share all of them on facebook (as I have been doing) because that would be overwhelming.

Painstakingly organizing all of the paper in my apartment

Graduate school has a lot of effects on a person's life and well-being. One of these effects is accumulating enough paper and documents to drown a small pony. I'm not sure how one would go about drowning a small pony in print-outs of JSTOR articles and photocopied pages of books on spatial theory, but I guess filling a swimming pool with these documents and then dropping the pony in would be a good place to start.

The other day, I needed a particular sheet of loose-leaf that had some particular notes on them. A friend needed the information that was on this particular sheet of paper.

Throughout the entire school year, I am pretty disorganized. Well, sort of. I'm the kind of disorganized person that can almost always find what I need to find - this being a bonus of very rarely throwing anything away. I am disorganized in that it will take me a long time to find things I need, because there's no rhyme or reason to my storage habits.

 I try to use separate folders and separate spiral notebooks for each seminar. This practice is, as I understand, completely normal and widespread among basically all students. I also understand that most students do not consider it a difficult task. The height of organization is not to have a "Spatial Theories" folder separate from a "Spinoza" folder.

It's too much for me, though. By the end of the semester it's just too hard for me to have multiple folders and spirals. I end up using one battered notebook where I dutifully record everything from seminar notes to lovesick diary entries. The one-spiral approach makes my backpack lighter, but it leads to disorganization. (It also leads the fear that someone will accidentally learn my deepest darkest secrets, like who I want to go to the senior prom with, but I like to live life on the edge.)

Faced with the task of finding this particular piece of paper, I devoted a whole day to finally getting around to organize all of the paper in my apartment. And I do mean all of it. I had just been dumping stacks of paper unceremoniously in the drawers of my desk, on top of my desk, in the chest I keep all my knitting and cross-stitch projects. . . . Like I said, not a lot of rhyme or reason to the system.

Piling things into categories (by seminar class) and stapling articles together that I had left stupidly unstapled took hours. Hours.

 This is me about halfway there. I sat on the floor and also watched "Call the midwife" while doing this, making the experience bearable.

As you can see, non-paper stuff was often mixed in the stacks of paper. In the above picture, you can see pencils, a book full of games to play with small Jews to teach them Hebrew, an iPod case I've never used, and a birthday and hanukkah card. This is part of the reason it took so damn long.

Things I wrote throughout the year (including lesson plans I designed to teach tiny Jews Hebrew), documents that I'll likely use as reference materials (documents relating specifically to Jewish thought, mostly), and documents still left to read were hole-punched and placed in these binders. (Actually that's not true. A large stack of papers are currently placed in the white binder, but not hole-punched. I was too tired to hole punch them. I'm looking forward to the day when I energetically pull out the white binder to look for something and then have all of the documents inside spill to the floor! Knowing me, I'll probably be so disgusted with myself, that I'll just leave them there and sulkily go back to watching Call the Midwife.)

To solve the problem of storing the vast majority of the documents -- printed out articles or book chapters -- I took a little stroll to my kitchen, AKA Box Central!

I rarely throw away boxes. I instead gently place them in a small cranny between my refrigerator and a wall.

As you can see, currently opening up my fridge requires a great degree of dexterity, tenacity, and stealth. You can also see I enjoyed some Tam Tams this past Passover.

I carefully selected some perfectly aged Amazon.com boxes to store all the documents I deemed "worthy" enough to save. 

Eagle-eyed readers will be able to make out that the top box is full of documents from a class I was a Teaching Assistant for, Faith and Reason in Islam. The box underneath has documents from Feminist Theory, a class I audited on Religion in Contemporary China, and a Spatial Theory class. The classes are separated by dilapidated folders.

When I inevitably found assumed-lost syllabi in the piles of paper-detritus, I triumphantly put the syllabus at the top of the pile of course documents. I thought that was very clever of me. It's like the title page for the mountains of documents.

I then put these boxes in my closet.

I suspect they will age there gracefully for a few years, at which point I will end up recycling the boxes in one magnificent swoop. The odds of me ever saying to myself "Hmmm.... this reminds me of an article I read for a class I audited about China! I should dig through my closet to find it instead of searching online for a new copy!" are pretty slim.

But I can't bear to recycle ALL of the documents I acquire throughout the semester... it seems cruel and unusual. I've toiled over these documents, carrying them from the department printer to my home! Many of these documents I even read thoroughly!

So this is what I will do. Store them in boxes in the back of my closet.

And then I will walk over my filthy floor, at least feeling somewhat organized.

Oh, and for those of you who wondered if I found the one piece of paper that spurred on this organizing frenzy? Nope. I must have thrown it out, which is pretty surprising. But oh well. Life's like that, sometimes.

(If anyone has any suggestions on how to determine which documents to save and which to dispose of, clearly I could use it.)