Here's an abridged list of my personal todo list:

Investigate gym alternatives
Talk to a prof
Buy clothes -- 2 pants, 2 long sleeve, 3 tees
Check out sports, music, singing, dance
French and Spanish
Greenway, rails to trails, creek restoration
http://www.assnforpublictransportation.org/
Investigate UN Global Studio
Livable Streets Alliance
Think more about cross-training your brain

I left out mundane things, such as paying bills, and this omits my huge list of work todo items. The above mainly represent activity which I'd like to initiate. Some are simply urban planning groups that I want to check out, and I won't discuss that here. The ones that are worth talking about are Talk to a prof, Check out sports, music, singing, dance, French and Spanish, and Think more about cross-training your brain.

Talk to prof
I speak up in my classes, but I'm yet to sit down with a prof since class started. We have a dozen professors for 100-odd grad students and no undergrads, so there's no reason not to take advantage of them.

Check out sports, music, singing, dance
The music, singing, and dance are a preoccupying force. I need to get better at playing music and singing, and I need to once and for all learn how to dance. Luckily one of my housemates teaches dance and has bee teaching our house and upstairs neighbors salsa. I'm hoping the individual attention will finally help me turn over the new leaf. Music and singing are a bit more complicated. I know I want to improve my vocal harmonizing and get better at playing pop on piano and guitar. But I don't know how to do any of them but with CDs or books. That's not a social activity but might at some point allow me to get into some more organized music situations.

French and Spanish
I might as well add German to this. Maintaining and learning foreign languages while in grad school is trying. I don't have the resources to study anymore, what with the grad school homework brain leech.

Think more about cross-training your brain
And now we come to the whole purpose of this post. How do I cross-train my brain? I think about this occasionally and it arose yesterday when I found myself writing a journal entry for my Sustainability class and chose to write about a French Symposium that took with a colloquium on Sustainability. It gave me the opportunity to transcribe a bit of the published program from French to English. It got me thinking, how do I combine my obligatory work with the personal stuff listed above?

It seems logical to start treating my various activities as a web of objectives and outcomes. Let's try some Omnigraffle charting:


Hmm. Is this useful? Probably not, but it gives you idea of what I mean by cross-training. I think it's good to be aware of opportunities to combine objectives into one activity.

Reading my life away

I read, I read. Past or present, it's spelled the same and means the same thing for me. Every hour of daylight I have is an hour for pouring over poorly scanned articles for which I paid 25¢ a page at the copy store monopolist. The first week my goal was to finish all my work and take the weekend off; that resulted in about six hours of weekend work. This weekend, with the help of a cold and my California-origin storage unit arriving, I was easily working every daylight hour. Some of that went to scraping paint off the floor in preparation for my furniture. Two hours were lost this evening in a failed attempt to get my couch through the two front doors that happen to be ninety degrees adjacent and progressively smaller (yes we took the doors off the hinges of those two doors plus that of the upstairs neighbors.) One joyful hour was spent reuniting with my guitar, one of the few items that was not damaged or denied entrance to the house. I now have nothing but eight hours of my grad school job and another 4 hours or so of homework to complete by Tuesday, and by Tuesday there will be another 10 hours of reading to do, and probably some writing and a test to study for. It's not hard, it's numbingly fascinating. I like the readings, but it leaves me no time to even read the newspaper or a good novel.

I'm also being forced to turn down a camping trip this weekend, partly because I'm committed to a bike ride but mostly because I can't spend a weekend away and keep up with the work. I guess that's what grad school is all about. It's funny, I'd be disappointed if it was easy but I'm also disappointed that it's such a time suck. I hope it gets to the point where it's more intense but less time consuming because my brain has developed the ability to compress to a higher PSI.

I also wonder if I really want to become more of an intellectual. Aren't I just ostracizing myself from more conversations and finding myself attracted to increasingly witty and snooty people? Or will I still be able to keep dumbing it down for the masses?

I know I'm frustrated right now because I'm morphing into someone slightly different. My classes are developing my reasoning abilities, the city is exposing me to its culture and physical elements, and my housemates to fashion, parties, and next-generation reality TV (skipping that.) Right now I can't put cogent thoughts together, either in class or outwith. What I get at the end of these two years, besides being older and uglier, will be an intellectual achievement that suits my demeanor, and hopefully a social life that cloaks said suit.

I wish I had a picture of the couch jammed between three doors with five stupefied neighbors crushing plaster and splintering door frames. The poor couch now sits covered on the front porch awaiting its fate. I will certainly miss it. Craigslist feels so impersonal.

new town social angst

I don't know how I often manage to not do something and then thoroughly regret it the next morning. Case in point, I went to a Red Sox game last night and we got through one out before the rain picked up and the tarp went on the field. My aunt informed me that they commonly wait for an hour or two before calling the game so that they can make a fortune at the concessions. We waited through a dry spell and then another system moved in. By 9pm it was time to give up and head out. Now, at this point I had the option of going down to Jamaica Plain to see a cousin of mine sing at a show starting at 10pm. There was also some sort of party held by someone in my department back in Somerville. My intentions were fixed on going to the show until one moment of doubt when I realized I didn't know what T stop to go to and I started to wonder how late I could stay out and catch the T back. Thus I made a hasty decision to head home and go to the party instead. Moments after making this decision and heading home, my iPhone revealed to me that the show was very easy to get to, whereas the location of the party was nowhere to be found in my email. I ended up at home with some ice cream and a book, the evening wasted. And I say wasted because I fell asleep in 10 minutes, not to say a book or ice cream are wasteful.

This morning as I eat bad pancakes in my messy house, I am filled with regret for not doing the obvious, easy socializing that I should have done by going to the show. Now I face a very rainy day, which is awesome to me, with nothing worth thinking about other than half a room to paint, a bathroom to clean, untolds reems of paper to read through for homework, and the unavoidable feeling that I'm falling into the same traps I always do.

Missing socializing opportunities is a big deal to me. I spent my life up until my early twenties being shy and uncourious about people and things with which I was unfamiliar. When I was 23 I made a resolve to do never skip a socializing opportunity, and at 25 I learned to value the richness of available experiences and the effort required to realize them. 7 short years later I am still sensitive of my past apathy, and I dread the lapses that occasionally occur.

Being around 50 to 100 new people in grad school has taught me some good tricks about getting to know people. Number one is to hang around after every lecture to see if other lingerers form circles of chatter. I used to always leave school and class as fast as possible for no particular reason. Number two is push your way into circles of people at events and make introductions as needed. There's nothing worse than standing outside a circle and pretending to participate in the conversation. Number three: I'll tell you as soon I learn it.

I don't lack self-confidence as much as I lack perspective and peace of mind. Right now I'm hopped up on coffee and I haven't exercised in a week. Of course I'm going to be restless. I should go take a nice walk in the rain, and I will do a charity bike ride tomorrow. But then there's all that reading and painting. What is a single, 32-year-old grad student to do?

___________________ space for older version of myself to insert answer, or "don't worry".

In the beginning

I've lapsed on my blogging lately just when I moved to Somerville to start grad school. I should have all kinds of things to write about, but at the moment everything is so natal that it's hard to analyze any of it. I can say that there are very nice people in my program and the professors are cordial and casual. My roommates are more than I could ever ask for on the social scale. They've had three barbecues in three weeks. I'm fantasizing about all the great road trips I have to take; I've already gone to New York for a day. And my calendar is packed with class, homework, and social outings. Nothing is wrong except that I can't get my student Id because the university's computers say I'm an employee and not a graduate student (I work for a professor in my department.) The weather has been wonderful and now fall is sweeping in.

My tasks are all related to momentum--keeping up with the work, the socializing, and the exploring. I have to ignore my shortcomings and demons for now and assume that my better qualities are those that are on display. I have big challenges ahead, like completing my first writing assignment and inviting new friends on outings and to parties at our house. I also have to finish painting my room from blue to lemoncello, which takes about four coats of paint.

I don't have much of anyone for comfort right now except for three sweet but skittish cats. I'm looking forward to having some close friends sometime soon. It's sort of nice that I've spent so much time alone in my past because I'm perfectly comfortable with it here, and it pushes me to socialize at every opportunity, which I had hoped would happen.

I don't know if these two years are a destination or an intermediate step to something yet more foreign to come. If I didn't feel the pressure of the clock it wouldn't matter. I guess it can't matter in any case unless I decide that I'm in charge of my future. My aunt once told me that if I don't make decisions in my life that someone else would make them for me. I think I'm taking the reigns now, but I'm timid about steering.

So as to not end in metaphor, I will say that I recommend big changes to everyone whenever they have the chance. I guess it's one of the debatable benefits of being solitaire, or free of a self-run business or what have you. I've also thought a lot about this idea of saving up to go to school every ten years. It's too bad more people don't do that; I can't imagine mingling with 20-somehtings when I'm forty. I may have to do that linguistics masters in the privacy of my fire-lit den.

So long from east coast daylight time. The blue is going away, the kitties are not.