On the menu tonight

In honor of PhD applications (of which two have been submitted!!), I decided to cook myself up a little feast this evening. I had minestrone to start out with - organic, from a can, added parmesan cheese and a few slices of seasoned focaccia. Then I made enough pasta to serve a large family (leftovers for me!), which contained:

Orechiette Rigate (it means "little ears")
Four cheese tomato sauce
1 Eggplant
1 Zucchini
a small onion
a clove of garlic
basil
and a yellow Beefsteak Tomato (grown locally)

Delicious. And as an accompaniment, I made a little chopped salad of baby spinach, basil, yellow beefsteak tomato, cucumber, and fresh mozzarella with a ton of balsamic vinegar. So good. The salad was bigger than the plate of pasta.

But the most important thing, of course, is that I have submitted two of my six applications. One is six days before the deadline, the other 16! My supplementary materials are all on their way (except one, which is waiting for letters of recommendation to get back to me - why those can't also be online, I have no idea). I've been crazy stressed out the last month, and right now I'm wound tighter than a spring, as they say, but it's not actually that bad. It all comes together when you set your mind to it. This kind of pressure really makes me think. There have been some elements of my life that have been adding stress, perhaps unnecessarily so, if only in the sense that I certainly didn't need them, and there have been these great unexpected inspirational moments that I will never forget.

A few months ago, I went to dinner at Tao, and it was expensive and delicious - decadent! (not the service) - and with dessert (a giant fortune cookie filled with white and dark chocolate mousse and rimmed with sprinkles - highly recommended) they gave us giant fortunes. Mine reads "If you do not know where you are going, any road will do." I still have it hanging on my wall, sprawled across Russia on a small map of the world. At the time I thought it was kind of comforting, and of course it's supposed to be. But what's funny is that I've long had this theory that if you hold on to a fortune for too long, it's reverse becomes apparent. And I'd forgotten my childhood theory until just now, but the fortune had long since - the last few weeks at least - inspired the opposite feeling in me:

If you know where you're going, not any road will do.

That doesn't mean that only one road will do, I would never think that. But it does mean that, especially given as much as I travel, if you know where you're going, you probably know how to get there, or at least can find your way. Maybe that's more to the point: I am absolutely capable of finding my way. I've been on the journey the whole time. Maybe I just forget periodically where I'm going. No, I don't forget. I just get wrapped up in the journey sometimes. I can still enjoy it and stay focused. It's all about balance. Getting this accomplished tonight (this and other things), I haven't felt this balanced in a long time. Just one thing missing.

Update: five of six applications have been submitted. Awesome.

the end is near

That sounds so ominous, jeez. I should retitle this post "the end is in sight" or "almost there" or "so close to the finish line I can taste it." Something like that. Tomorrow after work I'm going to send off five of my six supplementary packets to various departments or admissions offices. Thursday I'm going to rework my personal statement(s) so that I am happy with them. And Saturday I will hit submit six times. That's right: Saturday, November 29. Six days before my first deadline and two and a half weeks before the most important one.

The reworking of my personal statement is absolutely necessary. Right now, it sounds rushed. It sounds like I was trying to say a million things and I had to take out half of them. Which is an accurate portrayal of its writing so far. I barely mention grad school. I don't mention my trip to St Petersburg. And now, as of last Wednesday, I want to include something about my impending trip to Buenos Aires.

Little reward for all this application anxiety: two weeks in the BsAs neighborhood of Recoleta. Which means that after I hit that submit button six times, I have a lot of research to do. It's going to be a writing/researching trip primarily (for most of those involved), but it will definitely be a vacation as well, of course. And since I hadn't been planning on going there before a few weeks ago, I know nothing about the place. But I will.

Back to the s.o.p. I need to incorporate my travels as related to my research interests, and that means I have to be more specific about my research interests. I want to study Cold War-era literature in the context of migration, particularly writers who emigrated to or from Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, and the West. How do these different migrations inform the worldview set forth by the authors' narratives? That seems particularly broad, but that's sort of my idea. I want to know what happens when we stop thinking in terms of the Cold War on one hand and postcolonialism on the other hand. That and I find "postcolonial" to be a problematic term for a variety of reasons. I also find the idea that the international situation was dominated by a staring match between two countries out of 190 or so reductive. I'm not denying the influence of these two schemas on the twentieth century (and twenty-first). On the contrary, I wish to explore what is generally accepted as "the way things are/were" because oversimplifying is dangerous business. Question everything. That's what I'm saying.

tmik, tliu

If the abbrev fits...  

I really feel like the application process is designed to make one feel completely inadequate.  On the other hand, that may be because I am not qualified.  I think I'm qualified for one program in particular, however.  (No names.  I don't want to jinx it, even though if you know me, you know which program I'm talking about.  It's something to do with writing, maybe.  If I write it, it will be real, and there's only so much hope - I mean confidence - I can muster.)  I finished a personal statement, but at 1200 words, with two major topics to throw in, I realize I'm supposed to have 500 words.  Talk about concise.  I just wrote a 60-page argument, and now I'm supposed to sell myself to a committee in two pages?  Well, plus the 20-page writing sample that is said 60-pager, but still.  

Anyway, I was journaling just now and actually thought - as if I am used to thinking in proverbs - that the more I know the less I understand, and really my thinking of it is more of the song lyric (Don Henley, which I'm listening to right now, actually), but I couldn't think of Don Henley, so I googled it, and there were all these blurbs of people asking what it meant, so I wrote my version.  

The more I know, the less I understand means that increased knowledge comes (by definition) with the knowledge that there is more beyond it, so it does not mean that the less, quantitatively, I understand, but on the contrary that the more understanding I gain, the more I understand that there is so much more to understand and that I will never understand.  

But we try.