Okay, so. It's October. I hope that is not a surprise for most of you, but it was for me. Especially when I now look at the calendar and realize that October will soon be November. And when I look out the window and see white puffy bits falling in a blustery fashion to the ground. What in the heckfire happened to the fall? And more to the point, what in the heckfire happened to the blogger responsible for this sadly neglected , pobre blog? Well, to be brief, I was consumed by paper. Yes, paper. Paper ate me. And it ate me whole! Many times over! How can paper eat me, you might wonder...well, for those of you who don't know, I'm now a Toronto-ian, and part of a marketing PhD program. I've learned a number of valuable lessons and experienced a variety of side-effects of being part of this new intellectual clan. I want to share them with you, just in case one of you gentle readers is considering returning to school in the higher education system. So now I present to you, in no particular order, the top ten knowledge nuggats I've learned since being in a PhD program:
(1) You are now an enemy to the environment because you are always printing off 20 page articles in large quantities, so any and all efforts to go "Green" are futile. Sorry, friend.
(2) You will be the proud owner of 4 pairs of glasses because you will go blind at an exponential rate.
(3) The highlight of your days are your five minute snack break (frozen blueberries, blackberries and raspberries - yum!) and you realize you have come full circle to your pre-school self, where the day is divided into sections by the much needed and desired snack breaks. Suddenly you will feel very young again. And very old. This will cause a headache. Take 2 IBProfen with your snack and forge ahead with the homework, because time is up!
(4) You now understand and can use in a somewhat intelligent fashion the words ontology, epistemology, axiology, phenomenology, existentialism...and you feel special. You then realize how few people there are in the world who care that you know and use those words on a regular basis. Suddenly you feel alone. So very alone.
(5) Exercise and legitimate free time are things of the past. Instead, you are constantly plagued with thoughts of things you SHOULD be doing, and those thoughts trump the things you'd RATHER be doing.
(6) PhD programs train you to be critical of other PhD professor's written work that has been published in high-quality, much-respected journals. Your illusions of these professor's greatness is dashed and you feel like you can be equals in the field once you graduate. Then you realize as soon as you publish, others will do the exact same thing to you. Say hello to the joys of peer review.
(7) You start having wild fantasies about the Matrix being real, so that you can jump down the rabbit hole, wake up to the "real" world, and have a somewhat questionable needle apparatus plugged into you and download all the books sitting on your bookshelf. The concept of skimming is suddenly a lifesaver. As is the 4 month check-out policy for the library.
(8) You get used to having a mind-numbing headache everynight, to the point where if you don't have it, you start to wonder if something is wrong and you need to do more reading before bed.
(9) You get excited when you only have to read an article twice to understand more or less what the authors are talking about. Small victories are suddenly precious and rare.
(10) Your life becomes a marathon - physically, emotionally, mentally. Estimated time of completing the marathon? Four years, eight months, five days, three hours, seven minutes. *sigh* And that doesn't seem like enough time.
So, there you have it, blogging world. Life is never easy, and with a new phase beginning, there are always growing pains. It's been a rough couple of months, and to be perfectly honest, blogging hasn't been the highest priority, nor has it been something that I've wanted to do. Sometimes you just need a bit of time before you start opening up about experiences you are having. Hopefully I'll be able to squeeze more blog time in the next while so I can keep y'all posted. But, I'm tired of making empty promises to my blog, so I can only promise to try. And try I will. Cheerio!
