Death by Grad School

The first week of school is one of anticipation for most students. We wonder what our teachers will be like or if we'll like our classmates. And when you get to college, especially beyond baccalaureate work, you wonder how tough the work is going to be.

I had my first class of the new semester, and as a newly minted doctoral student, on Monday. It didn't seem so bad. I might finally learn how one prepares for conferences and gets published--you know, typical tenure-track professor kind of stuff. Just the sort of thing I'd managed to avoid by doing a master's in creative writing. I'm a little stoked because I think it will help me jumpstart my studies and perhaps help me add to my CV along the way.

Yesterday was my first class with Brainy Linguistics Professor. I had an idea of the pain to be when I bought my books last week, but I now know that my life, as I know it, is over. I don't even want to get into it, except that my friend said the first time she took this class (why? why would you take it again for fun?!) she had to leave the room because she had a panic attack. Um, right. Sometimes I can't even get through a night of sleeping because I have panic attacks, so I'm sure that lectures on semiotics, semantics, and symbols (ok, that's redundant) are really going to be panic-inducing.

And I thought being a tortured poet was hard. Jeez.

I have resigned myself to a life of agony, because really, who doesn't like a little pain? Now I'm actually going to have to read Chomsky. I haven't felt like the dumb kid for several years, but there's nothing like the mention of Foucault (or Derrida, or Heidegger, or bleepin' Kant) to jolt you out of a smug existence into the reality that you're a total dumbass.