Boy, was it a rough Monday. Allow me to list a few things that have got me soul-searching:
After spending all weekend reading tons of essays on Jesuits, witchcraft, queer theory, and female agency in English Renaissance drama for a paper I'm trying to write on Macbeth, I met with my professor and gave her a working bibliography and thesis statement that she said weren't, uh, working. We came up with a better paper idea and she even recommended a few articles and books, but, wow, I'm back at square one with this 20-page paper due in four weeks.
Said professor informed me that I have very insightful ideas about the plays we're reading, but I have a tendency of confusing myself and my audience in class and in my writing by using theoretical ideas and vocabulary incorrectly. And here I was thinking I knew what de-stabilized agency meant. (Hey Donna, remember when you told me the exact same thing when I was a freshman in your Honors Core II class? Guess I'll never learn).
A PhD student sent a nasty email to all the grad students in English because someone recalled a book she had checked out from the library. See, here at UT, grad students can check out books for much longer than undergrads and lots of people take out books for months, which is fine until someone else needs them. Now, I don't know if it was me who recalled her book (she didn't give the title), but I was very put off when she said "it's rude to recall someone else's book," especially since, last time I checked, library books were for everyone to use. Makes me think academia can bring out the worst in people.
I'm dangerously uninterested in my Milton class. The only other time I was ever this uninterested in a literature class was when I took Milton as an undergrad. I worry what I'll write my research paper about (maybe what a jerk God is in Book 3 of Paradise Lost), especially since today in class I seriously thought about how maybe taking a semester off would be refreshing at this point, or at least remind me of my priorities.
But then what would I do if I did take time off? Move back to Mississippi? Work at Subway? Been there. Done that. Not a fan of doing either. Looks like I'll suck it up, do the reading, write the papers, and hack it through grad school. I may move back home one day, but for the foreseeable future, this train is only moving forward.
I hope you had a better Monday that I did. Here's to making the week better!
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Sometimes PhD students can be nasty because they think they're entitled to more than the standard student.
She should know that books get recalled--and they give you a week to get it back to the library (at least at U of A). That way others have the opportunity to use the book. Strange that she would get so nasty about it instead of just rolling her eyes and getting on with life.
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