The Mental Cheese-grater

While not saying too much about it, I will say that I have had one of the more difficult weeks that I have had in awhile. Most of the seeds of trouble that have been slowing maturing these last few weeks are now being harvested in bushels of problems. And the resulting inner turmoil has not been easy to cope with. But, I am coping. The advice, which everyone has heard, but which sometimes needs repeating is this:

It is not the end of the world.

What is in the past is in the past, one should look to the future.

If one persists, results should follow.

And it is never as bad as you think.

That having been said, the past week has been pretty bad personally. I continue to struggle, but the future holds more promise. My girlfriend has suggested that we both spend just a couple of days during our spring break together not even thinking about school. Excellent advice in my opinion. I am really looking forward to being able to decompress and not have to press my mind through the mental cheese grater of seminar papers. Here's to the future.

In the Navy

I had told myself that I wasn't going to post anymore until I had finished the majority of my projects. However, I received the following letter from the Navy that I had to share:

Dear Zhaf Razhid,

I'm thinking you're anything but the typical engineering student. Destined for a desk job? No way. You'd rather be out there -- immersing yourself in adventure, intensive hands-on training, and increased management and leadership responsibilities. And fast!

Check this out. The Navy Nuclear Propulsion Officer Candidate (NUPOC) program pays a $10,000 sign-on bonus and up to $75,000 ($2,500 per month for up to 30 months) to finish college. . .right now.

There's more of the same in the rest of the letter. You duly note that the bold isn't my embellishment. It appears exactly like that in the letter I received. Oh, and this is also a good section:

Take it from me. . .you'll do more in a few short years than most people do in a life time - all before you're 30 - in the Navy Nuclear Propulsion Officer Candidate program.

Besides the weirdly awkward use of language to appeal to what the Navy assumes a young person wants to hear (e.g. "Check this out"), there's a couple of things wrong with the letter. First of all, I am not, nor have I ever been, an engineering student. I am an ENGlish student. I assume that whatever database I was entered into, someone or some computer, saw the ENG prefix and made the wrong choice. And if they are suggesting that I will see a lot of things before I am thirty, well--I'm sorry to say that they're too late by a couple of years.

I have nothing against the Navy personally; it's just not my cup o' tea. But as an English student, I couldn't help but try to give the letter a close reading. For example, when they write that I'd "rather be out there -- immersing myself in adventure," I wonder if you could substitute "out there" with Iraq and "adventure" with "being shot at." Plus, the idea of being an officer in a nuclear submarine hundreds of feet below the surface of the red sea does not sound that appealing. For one, no matter how great the air filters on a sub happens to be, I'm sure they still s-t-i-n-k. A couple of hundred men cramped in a stuffy tin can is not exactly a rose garden. Furthermore, living a few hundred miles away from a nuclear power plant is one thing, but if something major ever happened to go wrong on a nuclear sub, you could not exactly go outside and run away. Besides, if I were ever going to join the Navy, it would have be with guys like these. There the dancinest bunch of guys you'll ever hope see. (Just kidding. I'd much rather stay where I'm at.)

Lessons I've Learned in the Slough

Well, it's been a rough few months at graduate school. It has been a huge adjustment. The work load (something which I was prepared for) and the competing psychological pressures (something which I wasn't) have taken their toll. Yet, even though I have a major deadlines to meet within the next couple of days, I feel oddly calm. Perhaps it is simply that I have become too used to the panic, or I have become numb to all of it. Still, there is a part of me that feels I can get all my work done under time without too much trouble. While all of the primary stress is a result of real problems that had to be addressed, most of the secondary stress was self-induced, and therefore, unnecessary. Learning how to properly channel the stress, aside from developing good work habits, has been one of the most important lessons I've learned this term.

I'm still keeping my head buried in work as this is final weeks, but I thought I would remind myself, and share with you, some of the other lessons that I have learned here:

Make bibliographic entries on everything you read throughout the term. Don't think of bibliographies as assignments that you have to work on a few weeks before the due date. If you are always working on them, you'll always be prepared. Research is an on-going process.

Know when your best times are for doing certain kinds of work. I find that it is easier to write essays and seminar papers when it is daylight, easier to read texts when it is dark, and easier to grade during the breaks I need to take when doing a marathon session of either reading or writing.

For Seminar papers:

Always have respect for the author. Do not assume authors are less sophisticated readers than yourself, that they were not as aware of the various elements in a text, or that they did not anticipate the various possible interpretations.

Eliminate the notion of author intentionality in your argument. Do not discuss what the author intended, did not intend, or should have said. Focus on solely on what the text is doing. Explore the tensions between elements.

Do not discuss your argument in terms of the response that a reader should or should not have, or how the author meant to affect a reader in a certain way. Every reader is different, and each “reading” is their own.

That's it for now. I know it is a lot of stuff, but that gives you an idea of the things I am trying to keep in mind when I am slogging through my piles of work. I'll check back in relatively soon to give you an idea of how things are going. Until then.

Mission Impossible: Seminar Paper

The bibliography was finally completed, but not without the usual amount of stress and worry about the whole thing. My next mission, should I choose to accept it, is to finish all of my seminar papers sometime this week and the next. Truly, there is no sadder and more stressed out creature than a graduate student. My girlfriend is in the same boat; recently she stayed up all night working on a project for school, not going to bed until 8:00 a.m. in the morning. Frankly, I'm impressed and a little jealous that she has the physical ability to stay up all night working. I would do the same if I could, but I don't think I'd make it much past 3:00 a.m. It is a time of night (okay, morning) that works like judgment day for me. At that time, I must confront the grim reality of the remaining work before me and recognize that the only thing I have a few minutes for before falling asleep is thinking about the consequences that I will have to face in the morning as a result of not having the work done.

The professors seem to recognize that this is how the system is built. It almost seems like they are fully aware that we will not be able to complete everything that they ask of us done. The challenge is learning how to get as much of it covered as humanly possible and then figure out which things you can let go of with the least amount of repercussions as possible. I find that this is a somewhat chilling thought.

Last night, another fellow grad. student admitted to me his trouble of balancing his teaching (a freshman writing course) with his own work as a student. "Frankly," he told me, "I don't usually read my professor's assignments during the last two weeks of the term." A surprising admission from someone who is an English graduate student, whose assignments include reading major works of literature, and someone who, although a novice instructor, has at least a couple years of teaching experience. Although I suspect that he may not be typical, I deeply sympathize, because I have seen the work loads assigned and felt them myself. I can only look towards the future and pray I will not fall into as many traps as the next person. But, as with everything, my main thought is primarily on the work before me. Although I have said it before here in the Cellar, it is time for me to mush!

Bibliographic Realization

Today my mission to complete a Bibliography for tomorrow. Of course, now that the pressure of getting this beast of an assignement is upon me, I realized that it would be much better to create a bibliography on everything that I read as I go through the term. Every class I have had has required that I read various articles to help inform the readings that were assigned for the term. Just the morning I thought, "hey, I should have done an entry for those *darn things after reading them." To use a famous cliche, hindsight is 20/20. (* insert stronger word than darn.)

On another note, I have determined that if I am ever lucky enough to teach my own writing class, something I may have a chance to do in September, I will try to have a generous policy towards extensions. My own experience with professors who, on a mission to make life as difficult as possible, make life infinitely more difficult by ignoring the human capacity to suffer with life's challenges leads me to this new determination. Compassion is a virture that must be nurtured and developed. And no one should ever be expected to be perfect. While life circumstances may be unforgiving, people don't have to be.