Hey Lou,
How've you been? I haven't seen you around lately. Oh yeah, you're right. It's me that hasn't been returning your calls. Well, you know how life is. Please don't be offended – I've been meaning to write for ages… and it's not just you. I have hardly spoken to anyone other than DH in the past ten weeks. Good thing he's around. Without him, I don't know how I would a) be nourished properly, b) survive this crazy little thing called "we'll give you a scholarship, you just be brilliant and work your ass off in an essentially mental-masturbation environment where your ass-working-off labor has slim chances of eventually getting you a grownup job, much less make any difference in the world. And if you didn't question yourself every step of the way, we'd actually think you're not entirely normal. We're open-minded that way. Run along now, be brilliant!"
So Lou, forgive me if I forgo a comprehensive update of what's been up with me since the end of the summer. I had several such plans at various points in the last two or three months, for example where I realized Septembers are going to SUCK from now on till further announcement – lethal combination of end-of-summer weather, Hebrew holiday season, and my birthday, which is a mere 8 days after my sister's and we always celebrated ours together. So this fall the buildup towards our mostly stressful and sad visit in Israel was sprinkled with probably-anxiety-related middle-of-the-night nausea attacks that nonetheless got my doctor to suggest I should get an MRI. Well (though nauseous panic attacks have almost disappeared), this finally happened today under orders of my new American gastro-doc.
I was not aware of how unpleasant a procedure an MRI is. You are straddled to a narrow hospital bed for an HOUR (that feels like forEVER) and tunneled into the radioactive machine which produces alternate deafening noises of a fire drill, morse code, an old ink printer, and hardcore 80's techno "music" without the "melodic" component. Add to that my life-threatening pseudo-heroic conduct: once released from the contraption I took off out of there in less than two minutes only to nearly faint, stand in line for a cup of tea for which I paid and then pale-facedly left to wander out to the ice-cold air for fear of vomiting at the hospital lobby. The guy came out after me to hand me my tea, actually. If fall term should start and finish in nausea, however, I pick the sub-freezing degrees version.
There were other moments: like when I made a perfect poached egg for my aforementioned not-so-perfect birthday, took pictures of it but never posted them, though I promised my mother-in-law (who is awesome. she calls me on my birthday!) to send her evidence of my egg-technique progress. Then I did not speak to her throughout the ten weeks of term until a few days ago. SERIOUSLY, I was not joking, Lou. DH obviously had some phone calls with her, and I spoke to my mother no less than usual, so I guess in some moral world I'm still ok? In every world containing in-laws, though, I am surely condemned to eternal torment.
Then, after a first week of term, in which I literally wanted to DIE, coursework was making me that miserable, and images of my ambitious, intellectual, working on her death-bed sister met me wherever I turned, I was thrilled at the prospect of writing how I still kinda want to live, um not entirely sure academia is my thing, but yeah, living is still an option, and managed to fit a baked-good or two into my schedule. But then, I didn't write. And then, I had had enough but term wasn't over yet.
AND NOW.
Except for one seminar paper that needs to be produced from scratch (i.e. I still know nothing about my supposed topic "Prostitution in Ancient Athens". eye-roll….) I have lived to see the other side of my first ten-week term of GRAD SCHOOL (crazy little thing et cetera). Conclusions thus far:
1. I am not being "hard on myself" like people tend to think I am (and though it is probably at least somewhat true) when I say that judging by the courses I just finished, I was underqualified for grad work in Latin – though I did not miserably fail so maybe that counts for something. I have probably read more Latin this term than ever in my life before, and I have surely learned a lot (vocab! please stick to my brain this time!) but I feel mentally overwhelmed, like after a language summer course where you could hardly keep up through it and just wait for when it's over so maybe something might sink in and it will eventually seem like you made some progress and are not simply exhausted.
2. Who knew the English language would be such a hurdle? Expressing myself comprehensibly in front of other people among whom a faculty member (let's be honest, we just want all of them to say "No, I don't think you're stupid at all. Actually I think you're quite brilliant, that's why I keep being so thrilled that you're my student. Absolutely THRILLED!". Yes, ideally every single academic-superior that you come across should simply let you know that. But you grad students, you each have at least one prof in particular whose affirmation you pine for, am I right?), so producing coherent sentences in front of a class cum prof - and my writing is constant testimony of my incapability to keep a train of thought, let alone a sentence that has a beginning, some kind of predicate, and end (HA, see what I did here, I'm so self-reflexive… eye-roll. Challenging my reader! eye-roll...) – has proven a task I am not naturally talented for. I was never that good at it in Hebrew, and though my colloquial English is usually absolutely fine, bring up the formality a notch and I am stammering. Give me a sentence in Latin to translate out loud that contains a metaphor, two participles and some nautical technical terms for good measure, and I'm done for.
3. Life is wavering.
This is nothing new. I was never entirely convinced that a life of intellectual curiosity and painstaking writing of something that pretends to contain an actual argument was necessarily the type I would find worth living for, and I'm still not sure about that (HA! now there's at least one qualification I actually have to be a graduate student!!! SELF-DOUBT. Why didn't they tell me it's such an asset? I've got STORES of that and would have smeared it all over my application instead of trying to construct a coherent narrative of my academic career leading to this! particular! amazing! department! Instead, I would have just written: I don't know what I want to do with my life but I've successfully fooled some people into thinking I'm intelligent and perceptive. Now give me a stipend!) But ever since N died, moments of doubt are all encompassing, as in, why live at all? And that too is not new to you if you've been following my bloggingly neurotic accounts of not-so-late. But bottom line is, being a graduate student with health insurance and a scholarship, while living in the same house, city, country as the man I love, is a privilege.
Try to remember that, Lou. And not feel so goddamned guilty for all the people in the world who have no health insurance, income, or a loved-one to make soup for them when they have a very first-world ten-day-long cold. As DH, himself a man that at one point in life seriously contemplated the option of abandoning civilization in favor of chilling out and going native in Northern India, says: you can't give your place up and change it with a third-world woman. You will either die of an exotic disease, or be flown over to the West to get treatment for it. Either way, you lose.
