November 23, 2009

• I grow increasingly frustrated with each passing minute.  I've been thinking a lot about the past, actually far too much about the past.  Hearing gun fire constantly for 75% of the time I've been awake the past two days certainly hasn't been helping either.  Left 4 Dead 2 is a lot more fun with the sound at a barely audible level.

  I have so little free time.  I keep telling myself that it will get better and eventually I will have the time to pursue all my retardedly varied interests, but I just don't see it happening.  And even if it does, will I really be happy?  I remember having all the free time in the world in high school.  I spent entire 24 hour periods just playing video games, but I certainly wasn't happy.  I was lonely and fat.  I had the free time I wanted, but that still didn't make me happy.  And now I'm certainly not lonely and only 10 pounds fat, but I have no free time.  I don't particularly like thinking of my life as a series of variables and trying to change them independently to figure out what works...but I guess that's kind of the point I'm trying to make.  I've tried either/or, but I'd really like to try both.

  Perhaps I'm suffering from lingering burn out on course work from senior year as an undergraduate.  The homework was long, hard and extremely mind numbing.  Not so surprisingly, homework doesn't change that much in graduate school.  I should qualify that by saying that hard becomes unnecessarily hard.  I get so frustrated by the long hours I spend working toward the wrong solution or using the wrong approach that I've almost lost sight of any "light at the end of the tunnel" that I might have previously found solace in.

  And that brings me back to thinking about the past.  Did I make a mistake?  Instead of focusing on research and getting my PhD, should I instead have been working toward an industrial "turn this nob to here and make sure this dial never goes past this mark" job?  Something that I could have left behind when I went home each evening?  Now I'm on track to becoming a professor.  From my experience thus far, research professors at this university have no free time.  One actually commented that he wished he had more time with his children because he almost never left his office and when he did he was traveling.  That sounds like the shittiest thing I could possibly think of.  We're considering children of our own once we purchase our first real house and have the space for such things and I don't want to be the mom who is never home with her house husband raising the children that barely remember her voice sometimes.  That would be horrible.

  I guess I'm just jittery about the future.  For the first time in my life everything seems out of focus.  I don't know where I'm going and I don't know what I need to do to get there.  I can't see my path.  My lack of motivation clouds all the positive aspects of my life and causes me to focus on my slowly developing negativity.  I couldn't decide how to end this entry, so my husband suggested I end it by hugging him.  I did and it made me feel fantastic.  Everyone should have someone like him in their life because it's amazing.

  • 1:30 am
  • 1 Comment