Notify my next of kin; this wheel shall explode
As it turns out, I think I'm resolving a lot of unresolved things about my life this month.
The whole PhD thing has been something I've been struggling with ever since I applied in a heartbroken rush and didn't get in and then did get in, all back in 05-06. This past year it almost all fell apart during comps: an ongoing identity crisis and unacknowledged freakout that I wasn't doing what I wanted to do with my life. These things kind of persisted into the summer even though I started getting excited about my work again, and I spent most of the summer being vaguely into my project but still not writing or reading much. The last couple of weeks I really sat down and faced the obstacles. I figured out that unless I see this as a creative endeavor, I'm not going to be able to sustain any level of productivity. If I start seeing it and treating it as an outlet for my creativity and passion and start working only to my own satisfaction, rather than some strange career imperative of the profession, then there's a chance I might be able to do some interesting work while I'm here, rather than be stuck in unhappy paralysis. A second benefit of this new approach unglues my unhappy paralysis in another way: if I let myself take a creative approach to my academic work, then it won't seem so at odds with my other life interests, namely being a musician and a cook. I've been beholden to my supervisor's belief that the only way to succeed is to sacrifice everything else in my life. This has meant I haven't spent much time on any of it, fun or business, because that prospect was depressing and paralysing. Now I've decided that if I can't succeed in academia while also being a well-rounded, creative person, then academia won't be for me and I'll go do something else when this degree is up.
I wrote a good song this summer. All this new contact with the music scene in this town this year has brought up a bunch of old baggage about being a musician: all the times I let misogyny get in the way of my doing music, all the social and musical rejection that I've had since Grade Eight, and all the times I disappointed myself by letting it get to me. Fuck them all, I've decided. I'm going to be a musician regardless of all the assholes that populate this scene and every other. The perennially-working-itself-out-situation with the Musician is actually illustrating to me how much older and stronger I am--there couldn't be a more representative figure of all the things in my life that have held me down in the past, and it's not working this time. Ha: and the song's about him, and I'm performing it at a bar tomorrow for some of his unwitting admirers, real Male Musician Scenemakers, the kind who've done projects with the guys from The Band. For crying out loud, spare me.
In other news, I'm gonna see Bob Dylan tonight! How much more Hamilton can you get than meeting a bunch of people at Tim Hortons and heading over to Copps Coliseum? This town kills me.
The whole PhD thing has been something I've been struggling with ever since I applied in a heartbroken rush and didn't get in and then did get in, all back in 05-06. This past year it almost all fell apart during comps: an ongoing identity crisis and unacknowledged freakout that I wasn't doing what I wanted to do with my life. These things kind of persisted into the summer even though I started getting excited about my work again, and I spent most of the summer being vaguely into my project but still not writing or reading much. The last couple of weeks I really sat down and faced the obstacles. I figured out that unless I see this as a creative endeavor, I'm not going to be able to sustain any level of productivity. If I start seeing it and treating it as an outlet for my creativity and passion and start working only to my own satisfaction, rather than some strange career imperative of the profession, then there's a chance I might be able to do some interesting work while I'm here, rather than be stuck in unhappy paralysis. A second benefit of this new approach unglues my unhappy paralysis in another way: if I let myself take a creative approach to my academic work, then it won't seem so at odds with my other life interests, namely being a musician and a cook. I've been beholden to my supervisor's belief that the only way to succeed is to sacrifice everything else in my life. This has meant I haven't spent much time on any of it, fun or business, because that prospect was depressing and paralysing. Now I've decided that if I can't succeed in academia while also being a well-rounded, creative person, then academia won't be for me and I'll go do something else when this degree is up.
I wrote a good song this summer. All this new contact with the music scene in this town this year has brought up a bunch of old baggage about being a musician: all the times I let misogyny get in the way of my doing music, all the social and musical rejection that I've had since Grade Eight, and all the times I disappointed myself by letting it get to me. Fuck them all, I've decided. I'm going to be a musician regardless of all the assholes that populate this scene and every other. The perennially-working-itself-out-situation with the Musician is actually illustrating to me how much older and stronger I am--there couldn't be a more representative figure of all the things in my life that have held me down in the past, and it's not working this time. Ha: and the song's about him, and I'm performing it at a bar tomorrow for some of his unwitting admirers, real Male Musician Scenemakers, the kind who've done projects with the guys from The Band. For crying out loud, spare me.
In other news, I'm gonna see Bob Dylan tonight! How much more Hamilton can you get than meeting a bunch of people at Tim Hortons and heading over to Copps Coliseum? This town kills me.