The only way to it is through it

My brother inspired me tonight. He has a blog he is working on that I just checked up on for the first time in awhile, and now here I am. I started this blog 2+ years ago this fall, but have only written a meager 2+ entries...but oh, where the world has taken me.

I am in the midst of final examinations in my program at Yale, in my first semester of a two year graduate degree that I (still!) think costs far too much money. It's been a stressful, hard semester - more so than I would like to admit. I re-learned things about myself as a student (horrible procrastinator) that I really would have rather forgotten, and I have found I am a very different student as an adult than I was as an undergrad. I think I should have expected that, and should have been prepared for it, but it caught me by surprise.

You can't do grad school like you did undergrad - it's harder, and more personal, and a bigger judgment on who you are and what you're made of. I feel deeply flawed today for not being done with this anthro paper from hell, which was due at 5pm. I had a little bit of beer for the first time in...I don't remember the last time I had a drink of any kind, actually...maybe since Thanksgiving? Drinking alcohol of any kind absolutely destroys my productivity, so I rarely do it at graduate school. As in, almost never. I did tonight, however, and it got me all off track. Now I'm sitting here in my dumb, overpriced Yale sweatshirt, eyes mostly closed with exhaustion, paper not done and simply awful, really, but cheeks warm from the beer, and soul a little lighter from the conversation.

Life is full of trade offs, I think. Sometimes you trade a good, heartfelt conversation with your roommates (about heartbreak, of all things) for a 25 page anthropology paper. Sometimes you know you should double-down and crank it out, but you just don't (or can't) care. I'm not sure if that makes me a bad person - I know it makes me a horribly lazy one. But I just think - this 25 page paper will not define me. No one but the professor and the teaching fellows will ever read it (25 pages is a stupid length to assign, for what its worth - I'll write up to 15 'cause you can publish it as an article, but 25? What a trivial length. Why not just assign us a book to write?) so I am still here. Staring at freaking Microsoft Word, wishing it would self populate with the details surrounding incorporation of women into community forestry in Southern Asia. But it doesn't, so I don't beat myself up over it. I just sit here, I do my best, and I write.

My motto falls somewhere along those lines, these days..."just do your best, in the time you have...and then move on". It's really all you can do. I think I learned this last spring when I was frantically trying to reestablish who I was before the Yale deadline, and had to resign myself to doing my best within the real time constraints of the situation at hand. I think its realistic, though. You never get the perfect amount of time, you'll never be able to finish all of your assignments, you'll never stay in complete touch with all of your friends. But if you can do your best, with the time you have...you should at least be able to sleep soundly at night.