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diving into the navel, courtesy of Sweden
Dec. 11th, 2018 09:10 amFinding it rather painfully difficult to get out the door today, and I do have laundry to do. Ah, the curse of cold weather! I can't run my space heater at night because it makes me too hot, but I will be damned if I'm going to crawl out of my warm comfy bed into a frigid room.
Today someone on Twitter posted a grim little picture from the Battle of Visby, which sent me into a flurry because I, too, have a grim little image of a skull in chain mail from the Battle of Visby. Observe:
I took this in January of 2015, during a very odd three-week trip I took to do my final exam for my master's. The trip went Omaha -> New York -> Stockholm -> Milan -> Lausanne -> Milan -> Dusseldorf (well, the Ryanair "Dusseldorf" airport, which isn't actually by Dusseldorf at all) -> Stockholm -> New York -> Omaha. The "Lausanne" bit was the part where I was taking my exam, and the rest was. . . well. . . for my own benefit. It was very snowy in Sweden, as one might expect, and I wandered a lot around Stockholm in the dark.
The thing it makes me wonder is about some sort of different future -- well --
Right now the extremely vague idea I have is that I am going to try to get on doing volunteer research at the MIT Building Tech lab again, maybe ten or fifteen hours a week. I want to be in the same place until the 2020 elections, so that means that I'll be in Somerville until August 2021; that gives me two years and eight months to work up enough research to apply for a PhD. Right.
I mean, that was the idea. The extremely vague idea.
At [large box store] work they've put up a sign saying that "as in previous years, employees with more than one year at the company may take a four-week unpaid leave after the holiday season has ended."
I read that, and almost immediately another version of the future came up in the mind, based on that January trip three years ago: maybe I'd be less tetchy and panicky about how fast I can move on to the next thing if I knew I could take six weeks to travel a year. Saving the money is tricky -- saving the money is always tricky -- but [large box store] does regular $0.50/hour raises. After two years they have two weeks paid vacation, and after five years, it's three. If I could get to the point where I was supporting myself just on that job, I'd have a lot more brain space to apply to doing other stuff. Living a life, I guess.
I still want to do the research -- sure -- but it's easier to imagine having something that I could use to argue my way into a PhD program in five years, or eight. I don't know that many forty-year-olds starting PhD programs, but . . . well . . . whatever. I don't really know anyone who's doing the same sloppy job about life that I am doing.
Everything I can dream is pretty lonely, but for some reason the version of the dream where I can go mope about in Europe for most of January seems less lonely. Or at least less disappointing.
(And now, because I'm dreadful, a few more images from that January trip:)
Today someone on Twitter posted a grim little picture from the Battle of Visby, which sent me into a flurry because I, too, have a grim little image of a skull in chain mail from the Battle of Visby. Observe:
I took this in January of 2015, during a very odd three-week trip I took to do my final exam for my master's. The trip went Omaha -> New York -> Stockholm -> Milan -> Lausanne -> Milan -> Dusseldorf (well, the Ryanair "Dusseldorf" airport, which isn't actually by Dusseldorf at all) -> Stockholm -> New York -> Omaha. The "Lausanne" bit was the part where I was taking my exam, and the rest was. . . well. . . for my own benefit. It was very snowy in Sweden, as one might expect, and I wandered a lot around Stockholm in the dark.
The thing it makes me wonder is about some sort of different future -- well --
Right now the extremely vague idea I have is that I am going to try to get on doing volunteer research at the MIT Building Tech lab again, maybe ten or fifteen hours a week. I want to be in the same place until the 2020 elections, so that means that I'll be in Somerville until August 2021; that gives me two years and eight months to work up enough research to apply for a PhD. Right.
I mean, that was the idea. The extremely vague idea.
At [large box store] work they've put up a sign saying that "as in previous years, employees with more than one year at the company may take a four-week unpaid leave after the holiday season has ended."
I read that, and almost immediately another version of the future came up in the mind, based on that January trip three years ago: maybe I'd be less tetchy and panicky about how fast I can move on to the next thing if I knew I could take six weeks to travel a year. Saving the money is tricky -- saving the money is always tricky -- but [large box store] does regular $0.50/hour raises. After two years they have two weeks paid vacation, and after five years, it's three. If I could get to the point where I was supporting myself just on that job, I'd have a lot more brain space to apply to doing other stuff. Living a life, I guess.
I still want to do the research -- sure -- but it's easier to imagine having something that I could use to argue my way into a PhD program in five years, or eight. I don't know that many forty-year-olds starting PhD programs, but . . . well . . . whatever. I don't really know anyone who's doing the same sloppy job about life that I am doing.
Everything I can dream is pretty lonely, but for some reason the version of the dream where I can go mope about in Europe for most of January seems less lonely. Or at least less disappointing.
(And now, because I'm dreadful, a few more images from that January trip:)
