Today's soundtrack:
"Good Man" by Josh Ritter
"Ain't No Reason" by Brett Dennen
There is something both white and fluffy falling from the sky (please insert your best Lohan/Hilton cocaine joke here). Didn't I say that it always snows before Halloween? Naturally, the Snow Gods pick the day that my sinuses decide to become demonic little snot hoarding bastards to bring in winter. Well, it's not sticking yet, so I can hold out hope for at least a few more days of fall.
Nope, now it's sticking. CURSE YOU, SNOW GODS! Even the flag on Thorvaldson is flying at half-mast, clearly in morning for the fall. Well, I guess this means that it's winter. Time to break out the Christmas tree and my Nutcracker recording. And the rum.
At least my convocation pictures will have a snowy backdrop. And really, what's more Saskatchistani than that!
Now, if you'll excuse me, I really need to finish my legwarmers.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Thursday, October 04, 2007
grad students: mean girls without bulima
Today's soundtrack:
"Knock 'Em Out" by Lily Allen
"See the World" by Gomez
After a week of the blahs, in which our heroine could not see over the pile of work sitting on her desk, she was just starting to feel better after having written nothing short of a kickass presentation, when her legs were knocked out from under her again. The dear Spaniard did a wonderful job of assuring our heroine that crushing self-doubt is part of the human condition. This, of course, got our dear heroine thinking. She has come to a conclusion.
Grad students are horrifically insecure people. Paranoid that they might not be smart enough, they constantly seek recognition and validation from profs, conferences, and (commonly) fellow insecure grad students. Their actions can take the form of preening, name-dropping, grade-snooping, shots-of-espresso-per-hour graphs, workload kvetching, funding hinting, hours of study to sleep ratios, and (infrequently) brown-nosing. Rather than retreating inward, grad students normally brood over ways to destroy the fledging self-esteem, in one of the aforementioned ways, of other grad students, thereby transfering any self-esteem to the insecure grad student.
In fact, the only group of people more insecure than grad students are models. Apparently, the main difference between grad students and models is the development of an eating disorder.
Now, not all grad students lash out in such high school ways. Roughly 10% of the grad student population deal with their academic insecurity the healthy way - by drinking their weekends away at the Yard. See you at the next meeting. I'll buy the first pitcher.
"Knock 'Em Out" by Lily Allen
"See the World" by Gomez
After a week of the blahs, in which our heroine could not see over the pile of work sitting on her desk, she was just starting to feel better after having written nothing short of a kickass presentation, when her legs were knocked out from under her again. The dear Spaniard did a wonderful job of assuring our heroine that crushing self-doubt is part of the human condition. This, of course, got our dear heroine thinking. She has come to a conclusion.
Grad students are horrifically insecure people. Paranoid that they might not be smart enough, they constantly seek recognition and validation from profs, conferences, and (commonly) fellow insecure grad students. Their actions can take the form of preening, name-dropping, grade-snooping, shots-of-espresso-per-hour graphs, workload kvetching, funding hinting, hours of study to sleep ratios, and (infrequently) brown-nosing. Rather than retreating inward, grad students normally brood over ways to destroy the fledging self-esteem, in one of the aforementioned ways, of other grad students, thereby transfering any self-esteem to the insecure grad student.
In fact, the only group of people more insecure than grad students are models. Apparently, the main difference between grad students and models is the development of an eating disorder.
Now, not all grad students lash out in such high school ways. Roughly 10% of the grad student population deal with their academic insecurity the healthy way - by drinking their weekends away at the Yard. See you at the next meeting. I'll buy the first pitcher.
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