Tomorrow I'll be Perfect

 I've recently run into the most problems that I've ever had with grad school. So far, I've felt most comfortable in grad school and it's an environment where I know that I am capable to take on whatever challenges are presented to me. That changed over this past year, when I've had to re-do the proposal of my research project a few times and keep finding that I haven't made any progress through it. It feels like something is wrong or that there's a giant thing that I'm missing, even though I'm doing my work the way I've always done it.

I hated working in the office in the art gallery and held onto the idea of going back to school to do a PhD as the thing to get me through that time. No matter how much of a dick my boss was being, how petty people in the office were being, how disheartening it was to see how the art world actually works, I knew that I would be past it all in about two years and move on to what I actually loved. It felt even better when that was proven right during my first year and change in the program. I blew through my coursework, got to teach a lot, and did some cool extracurriculars. Then, probably partly due to COVID, everything seemed to slow down and work became harder and harder to do. Even though it felt like I was working hard and trying my best to re-frame and re-think things, it would always come out as a different version of the same thing and I would have to start over from the same place.

An unfortunate result of this was that the Flatliners lyric "What do you do when doing what you love gets you nowhere, it gets you nothing"* from their song "July! August! Reno!" was the first thing to pop into my head. I hesitate to identify with a statement from '07 orgcore, but I guess that's where we are baby. I haven't even listened to that song in ages, but the lyric was the first thing I thought of when I asked myself about how to phrase a post about struggling with school. Didn't want to put it in the title, because lord is that dramatic, but it bears inclusion in some form, so here it is.

*Never thought of Cresswell as a particularly strong lyricist and the fact that it was more or less impossible to type out that line in a way that made sense grammatically supports me in that thinking.

The better metaphor for this that I've held onto for the last three-ish months is that I am Dave Stieb, putting all of the work in, toiling through the entire game, only to have the whole project yanked out from underneath me right when I thought I had finished. I guess that the important thing to hang on to in that is that though seeing myself in an under-appreciated pitcher who suffered though defeat after agonizing defeat helps me feel not so useless at the moment, he also got the no-hitter eventually and he's still the only one to do it for us and hopefully that means that a victory is down the road for me too.