My college adviser told me to take out the line about wanting to be a professional student out of my grad school application and, in her recommendation, she wrote that, although my project seemed too broad and ambitious, I'd manage to narrow it down. That was over seven years ago. Since then, I've married, divorced, remarried, lived in three boroughs, learned to ski, saw the pyramids, climbed the Eiffel Tower and walked the streets of Venice, mastered Judaism and GarageBand, gave up on my rock-n-roll career, picked it up again, composed and recorded an album, starred in and produced two music videos, got a tattoo, and I'm still a goddamn student with a huge thesis that requires rewriting the entire European history of ideas.
I am a master at procrastinating. I do everything just to avoid writing my dissertation. I brew and have tea. I surf the net. I clean the toilet. I use the toilet. I make more tea. I go to the gym. I play my guitar. I write to RYS. I bitch to my friends about how much time I waste on bullshit. I tell my therapist the same. Hell, I've even gone to a psychologist at school whose specialty is to help people with their dissertations.
I'm on my fourth title. I've got scraps of chapters which have put people to sleep at boring conferences; a waste of fucking time and travel expenses. I've managed to birth an introduction. In fact, I've got five fucking introductory chapters, not counting the zillion outlines through which my supervisor, bless her heart, puts me through because, shit, she has much more faith in me than I.
But whom am I trying to fool here? I got a 4.0 and was a poster child for Silly College and went to grad school because I had no fucking clue what else to do with a degree in English and philosophy. I passed all my pointless exams with distinction at Pointless University, and I submitted and got my pointless prospectus approved. But that shit doesn't get me anywhere. I hate writing now. I even hate reading. And, most of all, I hate preparing and teaching inane lectures which will be misquoted by morons who can't even spell my bloody name. One of them asked me why anyone would want a degree in English, and all I could say was to ensure a life of poverty.
I've become too cynical for my own good, and this has cost me at least one friendship with a person who dropped out of grad school and got a fucking job. Meanwhile, I'm putting things on my wedding registry for which I don't even have space or use, for that matter, because my husband and I rent, and he, like me, needs RYS to keep him afloat, and also needs a fucking job. At least he's written his thesis and went to the MLA and bitched about it plenty.
Thank god my brother's a full-blown yuppie, so mom and dad can funnel money my way, but they're not getting any younger, and nor am I. I would go corporate, like effing Effie, but I'm a wordsmith, not an engineer. Please, please, please, help me drop out or give me one single reason why I should waste another seven years on a degree that will lead to absolutely nothing.
