Graduate School is for Suckers

Okay, so those of you who know me know that I have a big graduate school milestone coming up. If you don't know this, I'm not going to tell you what it is until it is over because I am deep in it and feeling a little crazy. I would say I am leaving you in the dark because I don't want to drag you down with me, but really, it is just because I don't want to talk about it in any detail. I just want it to be over with, for good or ill, preferably for good. Matt has been wonderful about my daily bouts of neurosis and just plain crazy, but I am certain he wants it over with too. Actually everyone that knows me wants it over with because I'm fairly sure that the stress vibrations coming off me count as an environmental pollutant. And the real kicker is, this is all for graduate school, an experience I have loathed from the beginning. Seriously, Matt asked me last week if I had enjoyed any part of grad school and what was my answer you ask? Why yes, I did enjoy one part of graduate school, the Project PUENTE part, you know, the part where I was on a leave of absence and running a middle-school afterschool program, that part. What am I doing with my life?!
Apparently, I am reading. Reading a lot. Reading all of that plus more. Lots more. And I'm still getting bitch-slapped for not including a wide-enough historical base in my lists. Of course I have read all the historical stuff, and taken courses in it, and designed my own independent studies around it, but I couldn't put it all on my lists, that would be padding. Instead I have to apologize for not including it and then talk about it anyway because it isn't just the grad students who are crazy, it is also the professors who shall remain nameless. Since when do anthropologists care about history anyway? I mean really, this is a discipline that has made a tradition of covering the historical background of their fieldsites in one chapter starting in the primordial age and ending the day before the ethnographer hit town, and this is usually the shortest chapter in the book.

I was a history minor. I live with a historian and am related to another one. Funny, no? Serves me right for dealing with a professor who toyed with history before switching to anthro and knows that I have a background in it too.

My summary comment, Graduate School is for suckers, and crazy people, and currently I qualify on both counts. I am sorry if this rant left you feeling a bit crazy too.

But at least this isn't you.