returns and rejoicings

My week in Bloomington is coming to a close. I have come for two weddings, a tête-à-tête with my director of graduate studies, and a more general rooting around my old network to find clues for what comes next.

I am at the point in my PhD that I have to decide what shall effectively provide the scaffolding for my foreseeable future: my qualifying exams. I have to come up with a list of 300-plus books which will form the basis for two days of written and oral exams. Confronted with the shaming gaps in my reading and subsequent blinding ignorance, it makes for an existentially uncomfortable process. So uncomfortable, in fact, that it births the realization that graduate school existence resembles a prolonged adolescence or reads like a bad translation of the Gallic wars. We become so acquainted with the well-worn ruse of self-sabotage due to living in such splendid isolation and interminable uncertainty that we actually imagine the rest of the world lives like this too. It is always a strange awakening to realize that other people do find a well-adjusted joy in quantifiable measures of success like a year-round paycheck, stable relationships and regular schedules. But graduate students seem to enjoy cultivating emotional extremism so much more, although it only manages to garner situational intimacy and small shipwrecks…

All frothy statements which get me no closer to the construction of my exams lists (which doubles as the composition of my life). But I do know that my return to Bloomington, my retour au sources, has brought me one step closer, my network of rhizomes providing the necessary emotional nutrition.