specialagency.net

Insult to goddamn injury.

Look, it's not that I'm saying it should be easy. I understand that graduate school is, in a lot of ways, a luxury. I have the world's most flexible schedule, I get to choose my own work, I get to sit on my couch eating peanut butter toast and watching thoroughly crap television while other people have to get dressed and go to work in offices. It's not that I don't work, it's just that the work I do doesn't look like work to most people. That's fine. I expected that.

And I expected that it would be hard. That's okay, it should be a little hard. I don't have a problem with the idea that I have to make some sacrifices in order to get what I want out of this. I was expecting the part where my mother asks if I'm doing homework and wants to know when I'll get a real job like grownup people have. I was expecting the part where I learn to love the secondhand clothing store not because I have a fabulous thrift-store fashion sense but just because it's cheap. What I wasn't expecting, I guess, was to be so constantly aware of how little money I have to work with, and how uncertain the job market is going to be when I graduate.

But that's all normal. When the university tells you that you should be grateful for your fourteen thousand dollars a year, and by the way you're not allowed to take any extra jobs to supplement that stipend? That's normal. When you feel your general conversational skills slipping away and become uncomfortably familiar with the blank looks of people around you as you can't stop yourself from talking about your research? That's normal. What's not normal, and not okay, is when you get screwed out of a prestigious fellowship because your university and Fed Ex can't work out their schedules. I wasn't one of the students affected (my research takes me to places like Worcester, remember, not Paris), but I'm feeling a lot of anger on their behalf.