resume

This blog has been on life-support for the past year. Doing a PhD is hard, and I ran out of stuff to say, and really nothing very interesting was happening in my life. I'll try to start posting more frequently now that i'm totally unemployed.

So, i'm about to move to Chicago to live off my friend's largesse for the summer. I'm at a serious crossroads...keep doing this PhD, or find a job. If I come back for another year of the phd, i'll probably end up finishing it. It would be very hard to turn away after putting two years into it. If I take a job now, I probably won't ever come back to academia.

I thought i had decided to go the job route, but now that I can take a breath, I'm not so sure. The overarching plan for the summer has been to look for real jobs. I've turned down a paid internship in Louisville at a cool organization to have more time to job hunt, so I've sort of committed to it.

I am very bad at making life decisions. On the one hand, I want a job, because I want a stable life. I'm almost 30, and most of my peers are becoming bona fide grownups, with houses, live-in significant others or marriages, six-figure jobs, stock portfolios, etc. I'm sure that babies are just around the corner. I, however, am penniless, landless, and single. I enjoy none of the trappings of a grownup, save for the MPA after my name.

Maybe it's stupid to want to keep up with the Joneses, but part of me is feeling fairly left behind (not in the Rapture kind of way). I want to have a salary and a community and a life and (hopefully) find some cool gal who wants to hang out with me without clothes on. On the other hand, I like freedom. With school, nobody ever tells me what to do. Nobody tells me I can't go to the dentist at 3 on a wednesday. Nobody tells me to wake up before 9:00 am. Nobody tells me to tuck-in my shirt or comb my hair or put on a tie. That's nice. I worked moderately hard this past semester and did ok, gradewise. I worked hard for about 2 months out of the 4. Granted, during those two months, i had no life whatsoever. I've put in a year, and I'm pretty sure I can just barely make out a path to finishing it. I don't know...

Having a PhD would be something I did...I could look at my life and say, hey, I did that. I may be in debt, and I may be poor, and I may be single, but damnit, not many people do that, and I did that. Of course, not many people do it because it's sort of insane to work hard for no money for 5 years so you can have an unstable middle-class job.

Well, that's what's up with me. Time to escape with my homemade drug...making fart noises and laughing like a retard!