salad days
(so how's grad school??)
In the mornings, I pass a diner/cafe/deli on my way up to the office. There’s a guy who I’m guessing opens, or maybe owns the place, because he seems to be there almost every morning — smoking a cigarette, still in his apron, or wiping down the counter inside. I don’t know his name, and we’ve never spoken, but at a certain point in the semester, we began to recognize each other and wave, and though I didn’t see him every time, I began to look for him every morning. (I thought about him after we went on strike and I stopped going to the office, whether he ever wondered where I was.)
Sometimes I see the sunrise over the garden, a whole block of green just off Shattuck. If I get to the office early enough, I get to bump into L., who cleans our floor in the mornings. On Thursdays or weekends I see the folks from K. Farms at the market, who have gorgeous (if pricey) fruit. Once I asked why their Saturday prices were 30c/lb more expensive than at the Thursday market, and they shook their heads, talking about inflation and the cost of fair wages, and slipped me a couple extra nectarines anyway.
In other words, there are so many little things I’ve been loving lately. A box of persimmons on a chair in a neighbor’s front yard, with a note that says free, from our backyard, please take, and a Li-Young Lee poem excerpted below. Crossing Hearst at LeRoy, glancing down at the bay, glittering in the distance. Walking home from Simons down the campanile path at sunset, and every couple of yards, I’ll see it happen again and again: someone else walks by, exiting a lecture hall or just walking south; they’ll see the sun over the bridge, stop, feel compelled to take a picture. Early morning runs when the stars are still out and it’s so cold my throat hurts, a semiregular Wednesday night hangout, gossiping with labmates even though the wall between our office and our advisor’s is so, so, thin. It’s nice to have a little routine, to feel like I’m really here.
So how’s Berkeley? I can’t imagine being anywhere else, or doing anything else; I really like both of my advisors, and the other first-years in my cohort; this is probably top 15-20% happiest I’ve been, ever. It’s… so cool that I’m getting paid1 to learn and read and take classes and just make myself strictly better. I never used to do this but recently, I’ve actually been laughing out loud at texts — did my friends suddenly get astronomically funnier or am I just happier?
I highlighted this when I read Normal People in 2020: It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another. But there it is: literature moves him.
Here’s the thing. I really, really like my work. But unlike many of my peers and colleagues, I think, I ultimately still view work as work, and in my mind there’s a separation between that and the things that bring me joy in a purer sense — which are all invariably about the experience of living in a real body and moving through time and space, about capturing the feeling of it. (Grand allegro to a live accompanist, the silver of a foggy SF morning streaming through the windows. Watching your friends finally perform the music or dance pieces they’ve been working on for months. Standing on the ruins of the Sutro Baths with a close friend of twelve years, the wind whipping your hair into stringy ribbons. Shaking words out onto a page, trying to reach an arrangement of them that’s faithful to what you really want to say.) To borrow from Rooney (writing Connell),2 then, it feels intellectually unserious to concern myself with these things. But there it is: they move me, and they move me in a way I sometimes wonder if research ever will.
So what am I working on?
When I’m asked, I’ve described this first semester as simultaneously fighting for my life and having the time of my life. Here’s what I mean by fighting for my life. I don’t feel as strong mathematically as I’d like to be; I’m not planning to prove some wild new theorems or anything like that, but still, I’m scared I won’t be able to do the work I want to do. But that’s the other thing. While there’s so much I’m curious about and excited about, I can describe the kind of research I want to do in only the vaguest terms. When other grad students ask me what I work on, even though I should just have a canned answer already, I invariably freeze, blink, look away (imagine confused psyduck) before laughing and saying I don’t know.3
(Maybe if I spent less time thinking about myself — or at the very least, less time trying to put my brain into pretty words — my research would be in a better place.)
I was talking to a friend recently about their research and how they felt about it. I feel pretty confident that I can do whatever it is I need to do, that I have the ability to ask the right questions and the skills to get stuff done, they said. I'm really not worried at all.
Less than ten minutes later they told me that they were intimidated by me when they first met me because, to quote them, I read books and had a blog and knew things about the world.
How could they be intimidated by me when… well…?
I think it’s impossible for me to not do things like read or write or think about beauty,4 even if I also feel they might be fluffy or at least ancillary to what really matters. But multiple times this semester I’ve thought — I’d trade some of this writing stuff, this art stuff, some of this preoccupation with aesthetic, for just a little more competency; I’d make this trade in a heartbeat.
A year or maybe even a few months ago I’d be surprised that I’m so willing to give up something that feels so core to who I am. But preferences change! These days I watch Simons lectures while cooking. These days I have opinions about whiteboard markers (lime green is underrated, red is overrated, I've never seen a good blue marker). And while obviously I’d love to have both, aesthetic and substance, I guess these days… I really just want to get good at what I do. (Which is why I went to grad school in the first place, right?)
Sometimes I wonder if I’m supposed to be this happy in a general sense, if I’m supposed to be having this much fun, when my work/ academic life feels so shaky; or maybe I’m saying that I’m surprised that I’m this generally happy also knowing the state of my work/ academic life, and knowing how much I value the substance. I think I’m suspicious that it’ll all come crashing down soon.
But maybe this is just growth.5 This semester was so hard. My classes were so hard and getting to a place in research where I felt like I knew at least sort of what was going on was so hard, and I felt so stupid so often. I don’t want to glorify suffering or whatever, and I’m not trying to make hustle porn. I just think there’s something really gratifying and sobering about knowing that there are things you can’t get unless you put in the work for it, that there’s a requisite ungloriousness to it. You can’t skip steps. You can’t get Revolutionary without grinding the arpeggios, slowly, to a metronome, without putting ego aside and just doing what needs to be done, dammit.6
(Affirmations font: I’m in my anime training arc. I’m applying the overload principle to my brain. Something something… you have to die a lot of times before you can level up in a video game. I died a lot, metaphorically, this semester.)
It’s a luxury, I think, to be at the beginning of this, to be at a place where my primary obligation is to absorb and metabolize and be curious, where I don’t really have to be afraid of judgment when I say I don’t know what I’m doing. (Still, at some point people will expect me to know stuff, right?) One of my friends said that they hope to never lose the attitude of a first-year PhD student, the attitude where the future is ever-expanding and there’s no such thing as being constrained to a particular path, no such thing as not having enough time to do all the things you want to do. I think they’re exactly right.
postscript: notes for the end of a long, beautiful year
Remember the strawberry sweater vest? I finally picked it back up and finished it this break. It’s funny; I distinctly remember trying to work on it while crying on the phone with a mentor, stressed about picking grad schools. That was this year, but it feels so long ago! — and it’s a nice sense of closure, I think, to finish it now.
I went to two exhibits of haute couture (Dior at the Brooklyn Museum and Guo Pei at Legion of Honor) this year, which is not that many, in a vacuum, but also kind of a lot. I loved them both, and want to see more like them; there’s something so special about the craft and the extravagance and the medium itself.
It’s now been over a year since I saw Parsons Dance at The Joyce (in Dec. 2020), and I still can’t stop thinking about them. Maybe I’ll write about it but honestly, I’m a bit afraid of ruining the magic in my memory.
For someone whose personal brand is “I read books and will be really annoying about it,” I haven’t read that much this year. On break I sped through The Right to Sex and Activities of Daily Living, easily my best nonfiction and fiction, respectively, of 2022 (reviews linked). The Office of Historical Corrections wins “best short fiction collection” by default, but I can’t overemphasize how brilliant it is. Best essay this year is “Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility” by Som-Mai Nguyen — rest in peace Astra.
Finally, some really lovely recent writing from my friends. Kat’s also on a journey of trying to get good at something hard. Jasmine writes, funnily enough, about feeling content in growing older and being anti-growth mindset. John is someone I would name as one of the best I know at making the people around them feel loved in all the small and big ways, and after you read this I think it’ll be obvious why.
I kinda want to bring back unhinged email signoffs (from Reboot newsletter days) in the next one but for now, see u all later :)
I will continue to send miscellaneous personal / writing / life updates from this newsletter, at various levels of cogency
not enough; we went on strike this semester. still not enough but better than where we were
yes i know this is also intellectually unserious
the more accurate answer is that I have some idea, but it’s fuzzy, which makes it very difficult to make legible to others. I’ve been trying for months, actually, to write some high-level outline of what I think but all I have is thousands of words and fragments scattered across gdocs/ notes app/ notion.
exhibit A: that i spent time writing this post instead of, e.g., figuring out wtf measure theory really is (or research)
i could not bring myself to use the phrase “growth mindset” in the main body, but i think that’s what this is, actually
on my feelings about math…. that’s a whole other post.
resonated with this a lot <3
sent a reply via email - hope u got it!