I’m learning that occasionally things happen in your personal life that you just have to brush off and remind yourself… “It can’t be helped;this is grad school…” Like having no clean socks. I don’t think it’s a problem I’ve had since my mother threw a laundry coup d'état when I was about 10, and declared that all Bird-kids officially had to do their own laundry… It took running out of clean underclothes for me to get the message, but I’m happy to report that since then I have lived harmoniously with such little “house-chores”… That was until, I discovered that I literally forgot how to function outside of the library… Enter: the joys of graduate school.
It’s hard to believe that I’m already half way through Hilary Term; which means that I’ve completed exactly half of my coursework for my graduate degree already! (Not counting all that thesis writing which still has to occur sometime before October!) Hilary term seem
s to be much more difficult in terms of work-load and pressure(and rightfully so, I guess), but at the same time I have to admit that I’m finally hitting my stride. I know my strengths and weaknesses in anthropology much better now, and have a feel for the field enough to finally start focusing in on my own research interests… Which has been an amazing feeling! I never thought I would read philosophy, but I can now rattle off political theorists and phenomenology philosophers (Foucault, Mauss, Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu, Descartes, and Durkheim have become my constant companions over the past month)… And sometimes I actually even understand what they’re talking about! Haha :) Definitely a big transformation from constantly talking about tissue matrices and mammary-based stem cell lines this time last year!
The massive reading lists (which I balance from 3 separate
courses each week) keep me pretty thoroughly buried under books. (The picture beside was last Saturday’s reading pile) I never thought I could physically read so much in my life; talk about making your eyes bleed. Just finding/gathering them all seems to be a part time job; I’m a frequent visitor at 5 different libraries acorss the city on any given week. But at the same time, as an anthropologist I get to read awesome things like “Wombs and Alien Spirits” and “The Sociology of Monsters”… Haha Reading about how the Anlo-Ewe of northern Sudan conceptualize the placenta as a stool that a fetus balances upon is definitely helpful in mixing up the philosophy readings… :)
But in a moment of rebellion this past weekend, while in the midst of a particularly difficult tutorial-paper-writing-spree, I decided to take up crocheting again as a stress relief (a wonderful suggestion of my downstairs-neighbor, Anna)… And it’s been somewhat of a life-saver this week, which was particularly brutal and doesn’t show signs of stopping… And we have done pretty good mixing up the monotony of grad school with dinners and other little “get together and complain/destress” sessions… A necessity, to say the least… :)
Anyhow, I’ve managed to delay moving to the stack of articles sitting beside me for long enough… So it’s back to the grind…
With Love from Oxford… <3 Mary Elizabeth
