Category: Navel-Gazing

Also not noted here this past week, another school year ended here at Columbia. Since I’ve been on a research fellowship the past few seasons, I haven’t been teaching, and I rarely have reason these days to leave my home and/or the campus libraries, other than the occasional trip to the movies, the pub, or the dog park, I’ve pretty much fallen out of the usual academic rhythms of campus…but, nonetheless, another year has passed, so it seems like a good time for an update.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I did less well than hoped — as in multiple rejections, some expected, some quite surprising — in the grant-and-fellowship-securing department for the coming year. But, those disappointments notwithstanding, I have secured enough funding to offset my usual freelance writing projects, and I expect to spend at least one more academic year here at my current New York City apartment, during which quite a bit more dissertation-writing will (and, indeed, will have to) happen. From there, with dissertation presumably in hand, it’s either moving on in academia, at some university or another (one likely not of my choosing) or moving back into the political-speechwriting world…these days, well, it’s still a toss-up, but I feel it’s becoming less so. My future will depend a lot on the well-documented vagaries of the job market, of course, and if, miracle upon miracles, an academic job is available at a university that feels like a good fit, and they actually offer it to me out of the hundreds of qualified candidates, of course I may very well take it. But I’ve found myself increasingly thinking that I’d probably be happier back in Washington regardless, either in speechwriting or at a progressive foundation/think-tank type place, where there’s some sense of being involved in both the unfolding of current events and the daily struggle to make this world a happier, more progressive-minded place.

This is not to say I’m closing any doors. I do enjoy working on my dissertation, and can still lose myself for extended periods of time delving into the past. But, for varied reasons, be they the usual late-term graduate student blues, the often maddeningly parochial nature of many academic conversations, the sheer social isolation of dissertation-writing, or something else (and I can’t discount last fall’s awful romantic implosion, which cast a pall over the whole year and — still, beyond any recourse — wearies and depresses me pretty much daily), I’ve spent most of the past year feeling profoundly dissatisfied with my current circumstances, so much so that I find it increasingly hard to imagine a life along these lines.

But, we’ll see — as I said, there’s still one more year to go. I only mention it here as [a] between the graduates in baby-blue robes everywhere and my impending ten-year college reunion, it’s felt like nigh time for a state-of-life update and [b] the disconnect between my everyday state of mind and my GitM-blog voice has been feeling increasingly untenable. I really have no desire to see this site degenerate into weekly whimpering and moaning about woe-is-me grad student angst. (There’s enough of that online already and, besides, think grad school is tough? Try Iraq, buddy. Or, for that matter, working minimum wage.) So, I’m getting it out of the way now, in the hopes that voicing my existential discontent once and for all will free me to go back to blogging as normal.

Still, I don’t yet know what it is, or what form it will take, but, doggone it, something has to change in my life. Several great trips and the always pleasant company of l’il Berk notwithstanding, another year unfolding like the last one did is really just too depressing to contemplate.