Your Grad School Sucks

I was perusing Facebook today, since I’m done with draft #1 of the thesis and taking a little break. I stumbled across these pictures of people that I am “friends” with from high school with all of their friends from high school. Incidentally, I haven’t been friends with these people in any real sense since about fourth grade, but we remained casually ambivalent towards one another enough throughout junior high and high school for me to consider them internet friends when Facebook came about in college. I could lie and say that it’s because I want to “keep in touch” but I rarely do anything of the sort. I look through their pictures of them being drunk with friends and wonder “how did so and so make it to NYC?” or “hey I look better than her now.” Shallow? Undoubtedly. But I embrace what little the internet can do to make me feel a little bit better about myself, especially when it involves secretly lording the fact that I didn’t acquire a beer belly since we graduated over the volleyball chicks that were soul-crushingly pretty back when we were 18 and being pretty was more important than smart (can you tell where I place myself on that continuum?).

So I was idly looking through pictures when I realized that these people are all still friends. They were friends in elementary school and they still are now. They still hang out regularly, or at least talk to each other enough to know where they work and who they’re dating. And it occurred to me that I have no friends like that, not really. Sure, there are people that I talk to online or will try to make plans with if one of us is in the other’s town, but I don’t live in the same state as a lot of them, and it’s pretty miraculous if I see my old friends that I actually WAS close to more than once a year or two or five.

Considering this, I am generally speaking about friends of the same sex, that is, chick friends. I had a lot of guy friends. I lost touch with them too, for the most part, but it’s somehow a bit different. Maybe I wasn’t as close to them as I could have been. With the exception of one or two, my guy friends were not people that I shared secrets with. Did I ever have that with any of my female friends? I don’t know, it’s hard to judge friendships from that age because they were all so filled with drama and the absurdities of adolescence that it’s difficult for me to consider them real friendships as I understand the word now. After about 10th or 11th grade I had started to develop a pretty strong misogynistic streak - I think all of the boyfriend swapping had eventually started to wear on me, or maybe it was a product of the guy I was dating seriously warping my world view and sense of priorities.

It has only been in the last year or two that I have begun to appreciate the female friendship phenomenon. I can pretty easily chalk it up to being in England and having no freaking clue how to deal with the guys there. Being Cambridge, most of the guys had attended private schools and had some sort of weird loyalty to their male friends. It was male bonding on a whole new level. I couldn’t get through it. In England, I was not allowed to be friends with the guys, with the exception of a Texan that I got to be quite close with. I was forced into having female friends. It was disorienting. But it was rehab for whatever had happened to me in high school. And so I have a couple of chick friends now. I’m not sure that I understand that sense of loyalty, the female bonding, or the fact that these “friends” of mine on Facebook still hang out with their high school chick friends.

I’m certain that I’m the odd one out here, but I feel like I’ve changed too much to even know most of the people that I grew up with. It’s not a sense of superiority, really, it’s a confusion at how I lost what I promised myself I would always hang on to - all of those old friendships. Is it my fault for my tumultuous attitude towards women or my stubbornness or my ambition to get the hell out of Dodge?

In some ways, I have to say, I envy those people and their happy pictures of their decades-long friendships. Only thing I don’t envy? Working at Ruby Tuesday’s.

I don’t know when news got so stupid. It’s very likely that I just notice things to criticize now, but news used to seem more relevant or at least better written in the past. I can forgive local po-dunk papers for having poor writing, because really, what journalist worth his salt wants to live and work in some place with a population of 2000, only 10 of whom actually have degrees of any sort? “Only the desperate and sucky” would seem to be the answer. Pittsburgh doesn’t really suffer from that though. It’s a respectable city, by some peoples’ criteria at least and, if nothing else, boasts a fairly educated population with UPMC and the colleges making up most of the city. And yet somehow, the newspaper here hires people that write with less proficiency than some high school grocery store clerk. This doesn’t include sports writers, who are notoriously bad, of course - their own style and degree of bad that is fully incomparable to any other form of written word - or the opinion writers with their constant stream irrelevant anecdotes. No, I mean the regular news writers, people that, for all intents and purposes, should have a degree in this stuff.

And yet more often than not I actually have a difficult time deciphering the news unless its in the cold “just the facts ma’am” style of articles that usually involve words like “stab,” “homicide,” and “suspect.”

I’m not sure of the necessity of most of the words in the sentence below, for instance. And yes, you can find it in this article.

“The segments, stacked like Pringles chips, are hauled to the drilling area on rubber-tired vehicles…”

I’m not going to go ahead and actually say what the problems with that are. Suffice it to say, it would appear that talking about a giant boring machine going under a river and building a tunnel behind it was not cool enough to warrant any sort of interesting or well constructed statements. Personally, I think that a giant drill that goes in one end and out another with a tunnel fully built behind it is pretty badass. And the most interesting statement that this writer could make compared the building process to Pringles.

I can appreciate comparing the unfamiliar to something common to help readers visualize, but is it necessary to invoke snack food to further explain the convexity of concrete? Do I care? It seems to go without saying that a round tunnel would have not-exactly-flat pieces. Ultimately, I would appreciate that only the quaintest of “news” be written in a way that uses so many pointless comparisons that it’s difficult to know what the article is even about. At least, then, I know that an article titled “Warm Weather is Ideal for the Melting of Ice” is going to be bad. Don’t sneak in your poor writing when we’re talking about something interesting though, Post-Gazette.

This is not a new complaint about the UK by any means, but I was considering my diet recently and a few things came to mind. Also someone somehow referred to me as a “foodie” the other day. This person was British, incidentally. Now, I can cook and have tastes that range outside of “bland,” “insipid,” “tasteless,” and “generally cardboard in flavor and texture.” This is apparently a novel thing here in England, but it does not make me a foodie. I have never had a truffle (the expensive fungus), I use store brand ingredients. I have, however, used turmeric, tarragon, and - blasphemy of blasphemies here - cayenne pepper in recipes before, which would seem to be enough to make me a foodie by UK standards.

When I first arrived here in September, I was willing to let some things slide. I was eating at college, and knowing what food is like at any university campus in the world, I was not particularly taken aback by the fact that servers could identify neither type of meat nor vegetable in any of the dishes that they were serving when I asked. I was a bit confused by the fact that their “salad” bar rarely had lettuce, tomato, or onion, but rather an array of mayonnaise-drenched pastas and shredded….somethings (no, it’s not coleslaw…I’ve tried). This has not changed. When I think of salad, I would prefer some identifiable leafy greens, maybe a cucumber here and there, and the option of using dressing that isn’t exclusively mayo.

But I have been here for too long to think that the quality of food is simply a result of Homerton’s crappy catering. I went to a formal hall event at another college that was very fancy, and Hollywood / red carpet themed. They served us an “American” style dinner. It included the following: steak with a tomato salsa that was, in fact, disgusting ketchup, french fries, onion rings, and corn on the cob. Apparently England believes that every meal (including “fancy” ones) that we eat in the states is some sort of schizophrenic cook-out / fast food amalgam. England also seems to exist in a world where salt does not exist and chips are not allowed to taste anything like chips. Upon passing a vending machine here you may notice flavors like “chicken tikka,” “steak,” and “marmite.” I would prefer my chips to taste like chips, thanks. If I want curry, I’ll get curry, not pay the equivalent of $1.50 for a tiny bag of chips that tastes like a very poor imitation thereof.

There are so many other things that I could list, but I try not to dwell, so I’ve just been cooking for myself a lot these days. Any country that considers rubbery overcooked meat and peas that are mashed beyond recognition staples of a nice Sunday dinner can sink into the Atlantic…just as soon as I get home can get get some chips flavored chips.

The result of my impending marriage, a glass of wine or two before bed most nights, rediscovering my music collection from the last decade and the coming end to my time in Cambridge has set me to thinking about the past a lot these days. It’s the end of an era, after all. Here I sit, listening to music that got my pulse racing when I was 13 and…oh god, was that really a decade ago?

It’s not to say I feel old, it’s just that it’s one of the first times in my life that I can think about it and honestly say “I feel older.” That’s the kind of revelation that you don’t have on birthdays, even though everyone asks. Unless you’ve only got a few years to live, I would expect that the birthday situation is never going to be monumental past the age of 21.

But I still have difficulty thinking of myself as a grad student, as a fiance, as someone that strangers have called “lady” instead of “girl.” Should I find that insulting or complementary? I’ve no idea. But all of this has made me consider the adage that we learn from our mistakes. I would like to think that’s true for me, but something that maybe we try not to consider so much is the continuation to that question “but was it worth it?”

There is a mountain of dumb crap that I have done in my as yet reasonably short lifetime. I’m sure it will be Everest-sized by the time I check out, but saying that I’ve learned from it doesn’t always seem to justify it to me, and so I regret it. Sure, I learned not to date insane only children from my first real relationship. But I also missed out on having high school memories that don’t actually make me nauseous, or staying friends with some people that I really miss, or getting out more, meeting other people…Instead I spent my time justifying “necessary” sacrifices that I was making for my relationship, which would be a laughable concept if it didn’t actually pain me to think about it. I bought it hook, line and sinker - the high school love bullshit, and I cannot express my anger at it.

And then there are the little things. Like going around a corner too fast on wet pavement on my bike and falling off it, bruising my knee and my pride even more severely. Did I mention that was this year? Somehow falling off a bike at age 23 is paralyzingly embarrassing. Saying the wrong thing and wondering how many people are still laughing at me for a flop of a joke over dinner some night. Granted, I do my best to block things like that out the moment they happen, but there are the evenings in bed when I’m waiting to fall asleep that some inane detail of the day will creep in, reminding the infinite perfectionist that perfection is always unobtainable.

Okay, maybe that’s a bit dramatic. Still, the big question is…is the humbling experience of profoundly screwing up worth the regret…and is the lesson just learning how to forget ever more efficiently or that we just shouldn’t care so much?

Got me. I generally go for the route of swiftly forgetting, although perhaps it would be better to just not care, but doesn’t that then erode personal standards? If we just get used to accepting the day to day and more impressive and rare foibles, what’s to keep us from trying to not let them happen? There is something to be said, after all, for trying to be your best.

I’ve always struggled with the concept of balancing content without letting it slide into complacency, and the perfectionist in me will always wonder…what’s so bad about being bummed about your mistakes if it keeps you from being satisfied with the unsatisfactory?

Just got back from seeing Iron Man, yeah yeah, I know, I was a little late on that one, but you can blame the UK’s incredibly terrible banking system for keeping my money from me until today.

Although my initial thoughts within the first 20 minutes of the film were lukewarm, after our hero got abused by some Afganis, the movie took a definite turn for the badass. I mean, anything with rocket boots and you can pretty much count me in. There are few things more satisfying than seeing every childhood fantasy about flying realized on the silver screen, except maybe actually doing it yourself. I’m pretty sure Virgin will try to corner the market on that, too, though, and I don’t have the scrillion dollars needed for my own suit, unfortunately, so this will have to do. There were points when I felt genuine glee at seeing a supersonic suit kicking ass.

I always find it interesting to see how every new comic movie tries to capture to comic form in movie format though. With Sin City it was that gritty graphical style and overacting that accomplished it, but this seemed a bit different in that, while the characters had the larger than life quality that you, of course, expect from comics, they didn’t seem forced or overacted. The cast just seemed to sort of fit into their roles without seeming like acting at all. And that seems to be a quality that has been lacking in comic / superhero movies for me. So there are my praises for the movie. Go see it, it’s a good opening title for the summer repertoire if nothing else.