Here are five things on my mind tonight:
-Lisbon, Portugal
-Seville, Spain
-Florence and Rome, Italy
-South of France
-Berlin, Germany
-Krakow, Poland
-Sweden
-Prague, Czech Republic
2. Of course, there's still a lot of Britain I need to see, and I didn't take advantage of the reading week to do this when I probably should have. Still, there are plenty of weekends and a lot of time ahead. Would like to do the following before Christmas break:
-Brighton
-Canterbury
-Richmond or Cambridge
And of course London a few more times. I may make a day trip Sunday. I would tomorrow, but I can't, because...
3. ... I signed up to go to a conference on "Dependence, Interdependence, and the State". What is that vague title pertain to, you ask? Well, it's essentially about dependence and relationship with the government, whether it be welfare or fascism. This is all being set up by the center for psychoanalytic studies, so in theory it should be a good few hours, right? Only 9:30AM-6:30PM..
...What?!
Oh well. It'll be a good experience. And I can always sneak out during a particularly boring conversation on the NHS or something. Besides, the debates on the health care here seem to be about the fear it's all become more and more privatized, so maybe I can enlighten them about just how splendid that setup works in the States.
4. Have a decent shot that I can sit on a fairly large sum of money by semester's end. It's what I'm aiming for. I don't budget as well for food as I need to be (make small supermarket trips every day or two instead of one giant trip every week, which would probably save a lot of moolah). On the same hand, I don't waste money on a lot of liquor like, well, the rest of the student body does. Still, when you're living on borrowed money, building a stockpile of saved funds will go a long way.
5. Last November was pivotal for me. A lot has happened in exactly one year. Quite a lot. The fifth year at Rutgers was by far the most rewarding and fun time I had there. That, coupled with my admittance into Essex and escape from the mindless tortures of experimental psychology, really changed my direction. I had become so disenchanted with academics, and I had realized most of my dismay was not due to my own shortcomings, but rather shortcomings in the fields of biology and experimental psychology.
The MA in Psychology at RU-C was going to be my last shot to put something together, but it became apparent so quickly that I did not fit into their scheme that I considered dropping out from very early on. My solution was going to be to seek out a full-time job somewhere and write fiction as my main pursuit. Honestly, it probably could have worked. It would have been a simple life, and I might have enjoyed it; certainly I have been at my happiest when I was doing some sort of low-level job and getting to know real people while having time to myself to do my own things. The summer of 2007 when I first worked at Wegmans and last fall at Rutgers both come to mind. In many ways I am not, and have never really aspired to be, an academic. There are two kinds of professors: the self-righteous twit and the burnout. I have seen plenty examples of both, and didn't want to be either.
I had learned about the program here at University of Essex back in August. I skyped with Kevin Lu, the director of the MA, all the way back then. I remember telling both of my parents during a trip to Ohio, while we were sitting outside the hotel in Twinsburg, that if I got into Essex I would push hard to make it happen. It seemed for sure I would get in, but the money for an international student seemed daunting, and for a while I was put off. But then certain people pushed me to go for it, that I could find ways to make it work. And so I did.
In the end, I did essentially drop out of Rutgers, but only because Essex popped up on the horizon.
This was just one of the many fortuitous things that happened to me in the past year. We'll see what's ahead.
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