Snowed In

Sountrack for this entry: Jesus the Mexican Boy by Iron and Wine.

I think everyone enjoyed the party. I was really excited that a bunch of new Hillcrest friends (Brian, Elizabeth, and Grant) made it. Matthew from the Women’s Center was a no show, and I haven’t heard from him in a while, so I hope he’s OK. But the turnout was good, people had a great time making the lasagna. It was like craft night, rolling out long sheets of dough, cutting up tomatoes, and arranging layers of veggies, cheeses and everything. Group cooking is a great way to be social.

One of the things that’s getting clearer and clearer to me is that being happy in San Diego is not automatic. From what I’ve heard about cities like Boston and New York, pretty much everyone eventually finds a niche. But that doesn’t seem to be true here. The graduate population is struggling. They’re struggling to find a healthy lifestyle, and struggling to feel like they are free to do work that inspires them. And everything feels really fragmented up there. La Jolla seems more like a shopping mall than a community.

And so a lot of us down in the Greater Hillcrest area are sort of like refugees. But even if you get yourself down here it’s not easy to carve out a life for yourself. The great bars are sometimes tucked away, and there might be cool people living in an apartment next door but that doesn’t mean you’ll ever meet them.

So what this means to me is that having a healthy lifestyle here is WORK. Since there’s not a community you can jump right into, it means you have to build a community. And the message most grad students get when they start grad school is not “take some time to build a life for yourself,” it’s “here’s a disgustingly large pile of reading for you to do, get started”.

And because the people telling us to work, work, work are highly decorated academics, many of us believe them. But if you don’t build a life for yourself now, when will you? When you’re writing your dissertation? When you’re on the market? When you’re a freshman faculty member?

No, of course not. Our careers are getting harder to sideline, not easier. And if you don’t start learning how to make your happiness a priority NOW, it’s only going to get harder and harder. If you’re lucky, you’ll find a way to learn before it’s too late. If you’re unlucky you won’t learn to put yourself first until after you retire.

If that first track is done, here’s another Iron and Wine tune: Each Coming Night.

And the real kicker is that blindly struggling against the grad school workload may in fact PREVENT you from the kinds of breakthrough thinking that are necessary to do a remarkable dissertation. Yes, prolonged hard work is a critical ingredient of a PhD thesis, but prolonged hard work on ill-concieved research programs is a waste of time.

So, here are my dreams:

I want to love my body. I want to cook and eat and run and swim in the ocean and surf and dance and do yoga in communion with my body. I want to be part of a community of people who are doing the same.

I want to learn to be gentler with people. I want to be more tolerant and understanding of other people so I can learn more from them. Where I’ve been intimidating I want to be encouraging.

I want to be creative and spontaneous and be part of a community that supports each other’s creative and spontaneous endeavors.

I want my home to be a refuge for my friends and family.

I want to smile at strangers as often as humanly possible.

I want to make a real contribution to my field. I don’t just want to do good work, I want to do good work that is adopted and makes an impact.

I want to maintain ties to everyone I’ve ever loved. I think the human heart is infinite in its capacity to love, and I want all my relationships to continue to grow.

I want to push on my internal hesitations and phobias.

I want to build things that people love.

I want to do some high altitude camping, to go hang gliding, and to run an ultramarathon.

I want to be more supportive of my family.

…

The list goes on and on, but I really think these things are supremely important for a grad student to put energy into. On some level, I want to do all my reading in class and make my professors love me, but you know what? It’s really pretty low on my list of priorities. Us grad students tend to overvalue the adulations of faculty because we think they’re the key to career success. But look at things differently:

Spend your time pleasing others and you’ll be always searching for success. Do what you love, and success will find you.