Perspective

That used to be me. The first time I saw Office Space was when I had been working at a dot com with my homies Ransom and B for a few months. Ransom and I laughed our asses off, because there was our life: the commute, the idiot bosses (B excepted - he was our immediate manager), the corporate park we worked at, the shitty chain restaurants. Then we got laid off.

Grad school is frustrating. You feel like you're always cutting corners, skipping on reading you should be doing, doing a half-ass job studying, comparing yourself to the great scholars in your field and feeling like the gap between your abilities and theirs is unbridgeable. For me, however, I could do this for eighty years and always remember what the alternative is: the private sector. And this is still so much better than that.

P.S. Details on the grant I mentioned in the last post: I was lucky enough to receive a dissertation-year writing grant from the graduate division here. That means I get paid and have tuition covered at about the same rate I would as a TA, without the TA'ing part. In turn, this means I'll be able to finish my dissertation next year and actually do a half-decent job with the rest of the research and writing.