Do I Like Grad School?

This is a question I have been stumbling over lately. How I am enjoying grad school.... Last week, one of my profs said "Look around you, these are the friends that you will have around you for the rest of your life." I glanced to my right and left, and frantically tried to work some saliva in to my suddenly very dry mouth. Am I making friends? I am not totally sure that I am. I have too many opinions, the leash I hold on my temper slips too often, and frankly I am just not a "joiner." It takes ages for me to make friends, and only 8 months have passed. Possibly, I am too full of self-loathing to even notice myself making friends, but more likely I scare people off.

Lately I have been angry about something one of my profs did/is doing, and I have no power to stop him or change his mind, I can't protect myself or my classmates. It really sucks. (for the record I am talking about poor teaching pedagogy, not lechery or worse) I hate that feeling. Powerlessness. The worst part of planning my wedding was the continuous confrontation with vendors and specialists who believe that they have an advantage over you, because they have what you want/need in order to plan the "perfect wedding" and they take advantage of you, squeeze as much money out of you as they can, renege on agreements, and generally treat you very poorly. This is why I ended up doing so much of the work myself or hiring friends who are not in the wedding business to do the things I could not. Ultimately, my wedding was not perfect; it was beautiful, charming, and utterly imperfect. My point, is that doing things for myself stopped that feeling of powerlessness. I think that if professor dinkwad knew what a horrible feeling this is he would rethink his instructional practises. Maybe.

I am presently writing a book review on an awesome illustrated book, The Wild Swans. Thomas Aquinas Maguire rendered Hans Christian Andersen's classic fairy tale in the most gorgeous pencil and tea-stain sketches. It's not bound in traditional book fashion, instead each panel is connected to the next, and it comes folded neatly in a "book" but stretches out over 60 feet in length. The panels often blur into each other, creating such gorgeous and weird landscapes... it is truly my favourite book right now. Of course, it helps that it is also my favourite fairytale. Juliet Marillier wrote a similarly powerful version of this story, in her book Daughter of the Forest. People are generally aware that that is my all-time favourite book. However, I haven't got a clue how to write a professional review essay, so I am just kind of avoiding it/gathering my thoughts elsewhere...

I said last semester that I was going to do some writing, and I did only the tiniest amount. This is fine. Grad school is busy, the assignments are generally not difficult, but time consuming. Oddly, what I consider time-consuming is evidently only a fraction as time-consuming as my classmates find them to be. I keep hearing these nightmare stories of "Oh, man! I was up all night finishing that!" And I, who put stuff off to go see movies, watch Netflix and read novels for fun during the semester, generally feel no stress, and I have never yet been up later than one am to finish an assignment. It is almost as if my classmates are having a contest to see who can get more worked up, more stressed out. The atmosphere is almost toxic at times. I was listening to a newstalk radio story about second-hand stress, apparently that's a thing. People who express their feelings of stress out loud to their neighbours are capable or infecting others with those feelings. Something to keep in mind. A few careless words can send another person into a tail-spin, evidently.

I suppose I shouldn't avoid my paper any longer. Still lots of work to be done.

Oh, but wait! I am trying to decide which story to focus on for my summer novel project.
There are several I could work on:

1. time travel rescue, save the earth, avoid discovery, underwater ferris wheel, living ghosts, middle grade science fiction.
2. tales of settlement/invasion, herb lore, rescuer/conqueror, xenophobia, romance, adventure, folk tales, young adult fantasy.
3. teenage ghost story, grief, denial, high school, intervention, spiral, acceptance, saying goodbye, young adult fiction.
4. dreamscape, flight, reincarnation, alzheimers, dark-souls/hungry ghosts, birgitte and gaidal cain, dual reality, lost love, adult fiction.

Working at the EPL this summer should still leave me with lots of time to write. Just need to pick one and get to it! I dream of these stories... I need to do something about that.