More Than I Can Chew?
It’s been a month since I graduated from Nicholls State University. I’m currently working with one of my former professors and several other people (students? former students? we haven’t formally met yet) and another professor from Nicholls coding qualitative data in MAXQDA. It’s going to be grueling work, since we have to read all these lengthy oral histories as we code, but I’m sure it’s going to be worth it. Hopefully I’ll even be able to get some French practice in, since some of the histories are of francophone residents of Louisiana.
Learning a new language and relearning what I’ve forgotten of another is… a difficult task in itself. Duolingo has been helpful to a certain extent, and I do feel, listening to the stories it offers, that I’m actually learning French, but at the same time it seems that while I do the practice sentences I’m mostly learning how to game Duolingo or to use a specific sentence rather than actually learn a language. For that reason, I’ve bought a couple other books to help out and a small library of French books to read (Le Petit Prince, Le Petit Nicolas, L’etranger, La Peste, some Moliere, Voltaire, Balzac, Maupassant, La Fontaine, &c). But with all this attention to French, I must not forget to pay attention to my Ancient Greek studies, which require so much time and effort. Perhaps it is the fact that I took four years of Latin and have a love-hate relationship with Spanish that makes French conjugations easy for me, but Greek conjugations are an absolute nightmare.
On top of all this, I need to study for the GRE so I can apply to graduate school this Fall. Then there’s the reading pile which no student of literature will ever complete… Right now, I’m in Reddit’s Deleuze and Guattari Anti-Oedipus re-read. I started a week or so late, so I need to catch up as soon as possible! Monday’s (or was it Tuesday?) talk on the Body without Organs was delightful, and for the first time in a long time I felt truly out of my depth and challenged by allusions to people I’d heard little about.
Manageable Chunks
The Cult of Productivity has always stuck me as problematic. Why should we try to squeeze every ounce of productivity from our lives (ostensibly for profit, usually not our own) when happiness is a much better goal? And why should we allow a world to exist in which worker happiness is not at the forefront of every business’s mind? Well, that’s what I thought when I had so little to do that I could sit around and think about such things. Now, as a physically disabled and mentally ill person, I look at “normies” and business moguls and wonder how on earth they get so much done in a single work day without having a panic or heart attack or a stroke. And sure, plenty of “normies” and business moguls snort cocaine and drink some kind of energy drink far beyond the recommended amount to get through the day, but not all of them. My grandmother got plenty done in a day without a drink and without drugs (aside from the correct dosage of those prescribed for her diabetes) as did my mother, God rest their souls. And so did I before my ailments came home to roost. I look now to the cult of Productivity to help me figure out how to make the most of my time.
The best thing that has worked for me so far, and one that I will continue to use (hopefully with more regularity) has been the Bullet Journal. I’m thinking that if I spend more time on my journal, more time making it pretty, invest more time into keeping it, and go back to keeping a time block on the internet on my laptop, I should be able to get some solid hours in per day studying Greek and French, the GRE, reading, and working on MAXQDA. That’s five subjects per day, and I saw a special notebook for being sold by mochithings.com but… I could probably make my own. I’m not sure that doing all five every day would be a good idea, though. I’ll have to think about it.
Dressings on the Side
At some point, I need to sit down and email some faculty about the graduate programs I’m interested in applying to. Or I might email some students to get my courage up. Either way, I need to narrow down this huge list of grad schools because I do not have this kind of money for applications. I really, really hope I get in! In other news, on my spare time I need to finish fleshing out the plot of that Nefertiti screenplay I was going to work on with my good friend, Ryan. As far as other writing projects go, I have nothing going on, but I would still like to post my series of short stories Imaginary Concerts in Real Spaces on this blog. I just need to write them.