Any Day Now...
No, I am not referring to Lifetime's weekly drama about Annie Potts and her black childhood friend, I guess I can finally say that I should be hearing back from schools, or employers, or the lotto people soon. I guess the grad school decision game (at least the edition I am playing) spans 3/1 to about 4/1. We're just about approaching the thick of it. It's weird, I've grown accustomed to the homeostasis of just waiting. Although I completed my last application in February and it's been barely a month, making this turn around time near equivalent to picking up my dry cleaning, I have been up in the air for the last two years about what would come after Middlebury. Before I knew about programs or fellowships or anything else, I had this germ of a thought about higher, higher education. Now that this decision is due, it brings a sense of closure and answers to questions that have existed as direct interrogation, rhetorical devices, wordless anxiety, and pictoral flashes about me in New York, or Cambridge or Chicago. In thinking back over the last few months, I realize how much of my activity has happenned unconsciously. In July, toiling away in the hot New York City sun, my best and only plan seemed to be CMS at MIT... and then over the fall it sort of blossomed and grew to five other schools, a shift to film away from cyberspace (for purely practical reasons), and flip flopping between Russia and China. This might turn into a professional downfall - question from the audience - how did you know you wanted to go to grad school, why did you pick this place?? I dunno, it just kind of happenned, I suppose, and no one wanted to hire me.
As much as I am baffled as to how I got here and ended up on this path, I think I've gone about things in a reasonable and rational manner (this entry is turning into me explaining my future to myself). I am still very green at picking a grad school, but this is probably the only way to go about it. I won't know enough about faculty or curriculium until I am in the midst of it, meeting colleagues, hearing speakers, and most importantly really reading in the discipline. And I won't really know my real options until I know who is willing to accept me and who isn't biting at my line. So although I am very new at all of this, my point is that I wouldn't be any better prepared a year or five from now. The only thing that will give me a little expertise on the subject is taking the next big step and becoming a grad student. Maybe I could have bought a book or something, like
grad school for dummies, since new parents take parenting cues from such manuals, but I guess I'll hold on tight and embrace the steep learning curve of picking a grad school (and all that professionally and personally comes with it) between now and May. At this point, I understand the generalities, but the specifics are very blurry.
Here's the thing, I have a lot of respect and even envy the people who have a calling. Already, after twenty-something short years on this planet, they are able to pin down the thing they want to do, the profession they want to be, they know where they are going and understand how to work toward it. I don't think I've ever felt that:
certainty. I know that I've enjoyed "school," but even picking a major was a game of trying to finish courses before my attention span expired. In four years, as a major, I contemplated writing, Am Lit, Am Civ and ultimately harkened down on art (which slipped away part way through into six courses on architectural history) and then was jolted into moving images from still, painterly ones. Let's not even talk about political science and how difficult it was to find two, long put off and procrastinated, remaining courses this fall. Now, it's film, something that a few wonderful people, experiences, and a good class have turned my flighty heart on. Faced with this track record, I am the last person who should be going to grad school. At the same time, it's probably the only place in the world that will accomodate my flippant, distracted, and scatter-brained curiousity. I am probably thinking about this the wrong way, as a job (or major) is not the be-all-end all of anything. Maybe it's too much of trying to be true to yourself with every fleeting passion or impulsive intellectual infatuation. I don't know. Call it tunnel vision, I can imagine anything else I'd really want to do a year from now aside from be in school. I think I am still young and naive enough to be under the misconception that we only learn things by being in school - and right now, I am very overwhelmed with what I don't know, the degrees I haven't earned - rather than what I do know or the rocks that I've got.
Aye, I am a mess tonight, apparently. I don't know what brought this on. Aside from leafting through my grad school pile earlier today, when it's all spelled out, I haven't really felt this way, expressedly. One thing I heard today, from the wise sage that is Oprah, she said that luck doesn't exisit - it's a matter of being prepared with an opportunity comes along and really making the most of it. I've often described the way I've fallen into film as
lucky, a series of beings in the right places at the right times. But, maybe it wasn't quite as out of my hands as I initially thought. These might be two different trains of thought... but in the words of Bono, perhaps,
I still haven't found what I am looking for - or the pieces just don't make sense yet.
posted by lmjasinski at 11:48 PM
