In the Venn Diagram of things that are both terrifying and true, the fact that I just meandered through my first post-graduate week is pretty firmly in the middle of the circle. And it wasn’t even like I had a boring, quiet week to help ease the transition–I managed to attend the (lovely, tasteful) wedding of a (lovely, tasteful) friend, pack the vast majority of my belongings, and haul my life across town.

So that’s been fun.

But in between assembling furniture and crowding six to a hotel room in south Georgia, a weird thing has happened. I’ve begun to gather glimpses of my looming adult life. The end of moving is in sight, and that means that soon enough I will have substantial free time in the mornings. I could take up running! Or sit in my local coffee shop and flirt with baristas before work! My tiny studio, which seems Parisian if you click your heels together three times and just believe, is within walking distance of Atlanta’s largest park, most famous art museum, and (to my knowledge) only botanical garden.

Y’all, I signed up for an improv class. On weekends. To expand my social circle. Truly, this is a brave new world.

I feel like I am on an excellent but still terrifying precipice. One in which I have to develop hobbies other than conning my friends into helping me move my belongings (followed by idly contemplating taking up minimalism because it turns out, things are heavy).

And I’m excited to do that away from the same little Atlanta neighborhood that I’ve called home for more or less 10 years. (Decatur, it’s been real, but I need to find new places to buy whimsical spoon rests and salt shakers shaped like owls.)

Tonight will be the first night I spend in my new apartment, complete with Ikea bedframe. If I write again next week, it will hopefully be about all the new and exciting things I have done in my time here. (If I don’t, assume that the Ikea bedframe didn’t hold, and check Twitter to make sure I’m still around.)

Image courtesy of Flickr user NatShots photography, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

By the time this post is published, I will be in the middle of the long, bagpipe-filled process of graduating from college. I am not particularly excited about the ceremony. I checked out from school a month ago, and even at the best of times I was never particularly connected to Emory College. And, of course, it’s been a difficult semester.

However, attending my younger sister’s graduation from Oxford College (my other alma mater) over the weekend reminded me that two years ago, I went into graduating with a very different frame of mind. I was excited to celebrate my time at Oxford. In the pictures taken during my graduation, I look happy (and slightly sunburnt from spending some day of the previous week drinking mint juleps on a beach).

Going back to Oxford reminded me of why. Walking around after their own long, bag-pipe-filled ceremony, I was greeted by professors and staff members and lookers-on who remembered me, and asked about what I was doing with myself. They were pleased to see me, and they remembered me well. Perhaps most startlingly, the way that they remembered me lined up with the way that I remembered me (with, of course, the polite gloss that someone else will give when describing someone to their face).

When I was at Oxford, I knew who I was. I don’t, now. For a long, long time, my primary identity has been Emily Chapman, Good Student. As I’ve mentioned before, I dont have hobbies. My friends–since many of them are pulled from my same scholarship program–are other people whose identities have mostly been built around being Good Students.

Over the last year, I quit being able to honestly identify myself that way. Schoolwork was unexciting to me, I didn’t finish my honors thesis, I wasn’t named for any of the school awards that I used to be good at winning. At the same time, I got hired at a job I like, and am good at, and where I am still massively insecure about projecting some version of myself that is still defined as being a Good Student.

I have never been defined first by being cool (or fun, or kind, or interesting), because I wind up being defined by being smart, and I am worried that that is going to carry forward forever.

(And, of course, I’m worried that this sounds incredibly conceited.)

Going back to Oxford made me realize how much I miss having that solid sense of self. Of course, reestablishing that is what one’s early 20s are for. And I’m sure that in six months I will be in such a better place to think about this. But for right now, I’m mostly ready to be done.

Image licensed under CC BY 2.0. Courtesy of erix!

As promised in last week’s post about not losing your time in a fog of Netflix and malaise*, I spent part of this weekend at the North Georgia Primitive Arts Festival/Knap In. As expected, it was fairly small and uniformly delightful. Y’all, it is a truth well established that festival folks in general are friendly, and rural southern festival folks even more so.

You want to feel loved? Haul out to the Georgia Apple Festival, ignore the warnings about chewing tobacco causing mouth cancer, and eat an apple fritter with someone who makes wreaths out of bullet casings.

So, I was just delighted to find myself with my two classmates and professor on a Saturday morning, heading out to Cartersville to hang with people who like to make their own arrowheads, and–in the case of the primitive bowhunter side of the festival–their own arrows and bows, and then shoot deer with them. We rolled up–one of the few cars that wasn’t a truck–around 11am, and headed on in. 

The festival seemed to be composed of a lovely little melange of friendly old dudes, Boy Scout leaders (and their corresponding boy scouts), and people selling hand crafted soap (because those people are at every festival ever). Early on, our professor left us in order to go track down some deer antler (you get to have a fun research budget when you’re in anthropology!) and set us to wander. We took a moment to watch an older man explain some particulars of pressure flaking to a very interested but also very clueless dude, and then wandered to the next tent, where a very friendly professorial man was teaching a scout leader how to make rope out of trees.

There was another educational tent, for artifact identification, but as we had no artifacts to identify we hit up the shopping booths instead. There was a fun mix of things for sale–polished stones, raw flint and chert (hard cores for the hardcore), and bobcat pelts were all hanging out in close proximity. I had a lovely chat with a woman selling stones, which went about like this:

Lady: Y’all up from Atlanta? We’re from Newnan.

Me: I have relatives up in Newnan!

Lady: There was a house fire up there today. Four kids died.

This is the kind of conversation that reminds you that you share a regional home with Flannery O’Conner.

Towards the end of our festival time, I was wandering around with one of the other two students–who is from some much more cosmopolitan place outside of the US–and she spotted the board describing the rest of the festival’s schedule. This led to my second favorite conversation of the weekend:

Her: Oh, brain tanning! That is… a metaphor? I don’t understand how that would work.

Me: Tanning is how you prepare hides to make leather.

Her: So… The brain part is a metaphor? Surely?

Me: No, I think it involves rubbing brains into the skin. I read about it as a child.

Her: … Oh.

She seemed not totally sold on the rural American south after that point.

Other than the primitive arts festival, I managed to totally fail in planning fun things to do with myself. It was a rainy, grey sort of weekend where I should have been many times more productive or social than I was. Instead I spent a lot of time thinking about how I ought to go to the Inman Park Festival and then–as has happened for the last three years or so–not getting it together enough to go. So, not a total success.

That being said, I am glad I managed to go to the one festival I did hit. Hopefully, soon enough the rain will let up and I will graduate, and I will be able to go to every festival between mid-May and Labor Day weekend.

* I’m going to list that as my hobby next time I reactivate my OKCupid profile.

This was a weekend of highs and lows. I will, as is my way, start with the lows:

First off, the actual temperature. It was snowing on Saturday, but–this being Atlanta–none of the snow stuck. So basically what happened is that small pieces of freezing rain made it hard to see and unpleasant to be outside. Y’all, I live in Atlanta. The social contract that we have with Our Lord Weather Jesus is that in exchange for living in a place that is pretty much going to give you asthma is that in does not snow in March. So, basically, ugh.

Low point number two is that I woke up on Sunday morning fresh-and-ready to do some Major Thesis Writing, which I had put off on Saturday in favor of grocery shopping with my dad, because a) I am a good child and b) there were almond horns to be had. This would have been fine except that–much like last Sunday, when I also tried to do some Major Thesis Writing–I woke up with a debilitating migraine. (It’s like my body knows what I’m about to do.) Trying to soldier on, I ate some cheese and drank some orange juice, at which my body pulled a walking octopus and “nope nope nope”d my string cheese right back out of me.

Is there anything better to start your morning with than freshly-regurgitated breakfast cheese, while blinded attempting to do something you don’t really want to do anyway?

(Yes. Pretty much literally anything.)

So that was a fun experience. However, a chat with my aunt shortly after confirmed that this is the Chapman Family Curse and that she, at least, grew out of them by 22 (which I turn next week, so fingers crossed!). Then again, the conversation also included a warning not to take estrogen-containing birth control lest I stroke out, so there’s that.

But not all was terrible! I had a perfectly lovely Friday evening, hanging out with a friend watching the truly, truly terrible 1980s film adaptation of Flowers in the Attic, ie “Affectless Acting: the Film.” In between mocking the actors roundly, my friend politely listened to my story of how I’d spent the night previous out with coworkers at an electronic music show, which was great fun except for the part where an 18-year-old tripping balls on what I assume was molly (is that the new hip club drub? I am old/a nerd.) carried on an entire conversation with me while I peed.

There is no Captain Awkward script good enough to politely but firmly say, “I am peeing, please leave, what the fuck is wrong with you,” while also conveying the appropriate amount of, “also it is 11pm on a school night, young lady, go home.”

But there is nothing I enjoy quite so much as terrible incest-cinema, horrifying my friends’ significant others with incest cinema, or Reese’s eggs, (thanks, Easter, which I assume is happening sometime soon!) and so Friday was quite perfectly enjoyable.

Of course, as the stress migraines have painfully pointed out, I’m still struggling to keep juggling those chainsaws. The chapter I was intending to write today is only five pages in, which means I’ll be writing it this week, and I have not pulled my weight planning my conference. I nearly burst into tears doing grad school readings this past week.

That being said, graduation is approaching. I’ve bought my regalia, and no matter how badly I screw up this semester they are still obligated to give me a diploma. (Suckers.) I still have and like my job. So long as I survive with most of my fingers un-sawed, everything should be okay.

In the shower today, I was thinking about this past year. There are some years where you can’t really remember what happened in them–they’re a pretty standard accumulation of the component parts that make up most of your life. This was not one of those.

This time last year, I was preparing to go to Dakar. I spent January through May of 2012 in West Africa, with a stopover in Barcelona and Paris. I had never been out of the country for that long, and I had never been to Africa or to Europe.

While in Dakar, I got used to taking cold showers and malaria pills. I sweated a lot. I drank in parks and was mopey and climbed inside a baobab tree and on a termite mound. I learned how to carry money, ID, and my phone tucked away in my bra after I had my phone stolen on my birthday. I was homesick. My dog died.

My parents came for spring break and we spent it in Barcelona. It was beautiful. I felt a little guilty for having parents who were able to come. We stayed in a beautiful apartment and ate many, many plates of tapas. A cute waiter asked us how to say “cider” in English.

I spent a week in Paris on my way back from Dakar. I used my French without once being made fun of. I saw beautiful things and ate a lot of crepes and realized that I was totally able to travel on my own. I stayed in a French woman’s apartment and drank wine with her one night.

I came back from Dakar in May to begin the horrible roller-coaster ride of a family member’s cancer diagnosis and cancer treatment. That defined the rest of the year. It sucked. (It still sucks.) I spent a lot of time crying in parking garages on my way to and from a job that I have mixed feelings about.

At the same time, I had the opportunity to spend the summer working in the sexual violence prevention program at my university. I did work that I am proud of and had coworkers that I respect. It was a wonderful experience in the midst of a terrible one.

I considered graduating at the end of the summe. I made the conscious choice to stay at Emory in order to work on an honors project that I am still not totally certain I want to finish. I’m still not sure how I feel about that decision.

In early August, I moved into my first off-campus apartment. I spent a week decorating it. I figured out how one goes about furnishing a new place and setting up utilities. I put my name on a lease. (I also put my parents’ names on the lease, because let’s be real, I do not have any useful credit as far as the rental company is concerned.)

Classes started in late August, and I (along with my classmates) learned how to maintain friendships outside of the dorms. Some of our efforts were more successful than others. I only had class on Tuesday and Thursday, and I thought that I would use the extra time to travel. I didn’t.

I kept working on sexual assault prevention.

In October, I started looking for jobs post-grad. I was offered an interview at one company that was later retracted. It sucked. I was offered an interview at another company that was not retracted. It’s ongoing.

In November, my family member had her surgery and began recovery. I drank a lot of wine and realized just how great my friends are.

Right now, it’s mid-December. I’m about to go spend a week with my family, and then a week in Boston on a spur-of-the-moment New Year’s trip with a friend. I am excited.

Despite the terrible, terrible roller coaster of the last year, I started 2012 pretty excited for what would come. I don’t know that I’m starting 2013 in the same way (mostly, I’m just scared of graduating). But I do think that 2012 showed me that I can do a hell of a lot in a pretty short span of time, and that no matter what 2013 brings it cannot possibly cover the insane emotional ground of 2012′s travel-dead dog-malaria-cancer-job hunt extravaganza.

It’s nearing finals week, which of course means that I spent most of the weekend the hell away from campus. Currently, campus smells of dispair and freshmen who are freaked out since they didn’t do any of the course readings. Given that the only final exam that I have is during the very last slot, a week away, this is not anything that I need. So instead I experimented with having friends and hobbies and a social life again, which was exciting.

Friday morning involved some unusual (for me) on campus time. One of my final research projects for the semester involves measuring tiny pieces of rock to learn about cognitive evolution, so I spent most of the morning in an on-campus computer lab, using very expensive software to make very accurate calculations of just how statistically insignificant my sad little undergraduate rock measures are. These are things that I am fairly certain are significant, so I got to have the always-fun experience of writing a paper conclusion that basically boiled down to, “next time, maybe don’t have undergraduates do this.” The glamour of science!

Friday night was an improvement, and involved volunteering at Dad’s Garage, the local improv theater. Though it was awkward (walking into a volunteer event alone is a little like being the new kid at school), the volunteers that willingly spend their time stuffing envelopes for a theater company that puts on a Friday night improv wrestling show are–generally speaking–good folks. Plus, there was free pizza and beer. And those fudge covered oreos that I think are seasonal because if they weren’t everyone would eat them and die. There are worse ways to spend an evening.

Saturday was luxuriously off-campus. I took advantage of this to go on an outing with a Potential Gentleman Caller, where I of course ran into five of my former residents and a current coworker because this is my life. The evening ended with a Christmas party where I moved about with the other introverts and made enthusiastic hand gestures about British television, and ate a great deal of phenomenal finger foods. I am not (generally speaking) a party person, but it was a nice event.

It was also a terrifying reminder that college is nearly over, but I pushed that feeling down because there was more egg nog to be drunk.

Sunday involved on-campus employment, which meant that I spent most of the day smelling faintly of Windex. (Fun fact: I have a skin rash on my hand that I am like 90% certain is related to the amount of Windex that is constantly soaking my person. So hot.) The evening was much improved by an impromptu dinner with sorority sisters, where I got a nice confirmation that I am not the only person who’s really into Wet ‘n Wild’s 99 cent nail polish (and who has constantly chipping nails as a result). So, you know, chanting of “one of us” and all that.

Post-dinner, I grabbed a drink with another Potential Gentleman Caller (I had a very active social life this weekend, for someone who’s fundamentally baffled by other people*), where I chatted with great enthusiasm about Marcel Mauss and Doctor Who, because as has been established before, I make weird date conversation. But, y’know, sometimes (always) I have Feelings about anthropology’s delightful history of constant apology. Even if the conversation had been terrible, I would have been pleased by the dark oatmeal stout (brewed on site!) that I was drinking.

On a related note, I drink like an old English fisherman.

I have two more classes before the semester is over. There is some dreamy part of me that thinks this will result in a life without anxiety and with the opportunity for following my weirdo bliss. Actual person me realizes that this will mean a week of straight-up napping, followed by a whirlwind tour of northwest Arkansas and Boston (she said, for the first time in history), ending with a panicked attempt to start work on my thesis which is due in April, oh god.

But there will probably be egg nog in the middle! So there is that.

* OKCupid, mofos.

Hahah, ugh, being kindly let down and still kind of disappointed? The worst! We’re trying round two today, so fingers crossed.

But I will not leave you hanging, readers. Instead, I’m going to tell the story of how I remembered why I cannot be in departments other than my own for more than like 20 minutes.

So I have a friend, who I originally met in freshman year swimming (while we treaded water, I recited French poetry to her and she repeated the seven signs of clinical depression back to me–this is probably why we were bad enough at swimming to need college swim lessons). She is also majoring in people with me, and–because she is a talented woman–has a second major in a different, sciencey department where they study brains.

In one of her classes this week, the professor brought up eugenics, aka how Nazis roll. On a serious note, eugenics in the US is deeply troubling because of our super racist history with forced sterilization. I think that everyone can agree that removing someone’s ability to have kids without them knowing and then lying about it? Rude behavior!

So imagine everyone’s delight when the future brain surgeons in the room apparently decided that eugenics is a-ok. Like, not even were couching it in terms of improved genetic testing, or working to remove genetic disorders from the population, but in just straight-up, forced-sterilization-is-cool language. Because sure it was bad in the past, but now it’s gonna be fine. We’re done with racism! These choices are totally fine, because we will be making them for other people, and we’re reasonable.

Just… ugh. Seriously, are not listening to the words coming out of your ignorant mouth? Do I have to print out Yo Is This Racist and hit you over the head with it, my fellow cohort members?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to my department, where everyone makes stone tools and leaves everyone else the hell alone. (Unless they’re a gibbon, in which case… life is maybe a little not great for you, gibbon buddy.)

I realize that this is a weakness, but I really love short-term projects where I control a large part of the process. I like having a clear beginning and end date and am happy forging a path to connect the two. But when we get to something like my honors thesis–a 100-page document of original research which I have to have written and defended by mid-April–I’m at a loss. It’s a huge project! I want to be working on it so it can be done by February!

But I can’t: I have to wait for IRB approval for the next month, and collect the literature review, and write each of my little chapters (for which I have to wait until the research is done). I have lots to do and no ability to do any of it–and I know that I will be weeping about my overload come February.

Well, at least, I think I do. I know that’s what everyone says will happen. The flip side of my desire to plough through things in small, consistent, uninterrupted chunks (the origin of my anxiety about long-term, multi-part projects) is that I tend to do things well in advance. I’m at a constant low level of anxiety, but it never peaks. It just hovers like that and things… work out.

I can’t decide if I’d prefer some other pattern, as this is the one that I’ve been in since I started college. In high school, my life was governed by the rhythm of a monthly newspaper production cycle, and so there was never any sudden surge to the finish line–each week had its part, and though some were rougher than others they were fairly predictable. I kept cranking, and when each issue was published I started again. The production cycle was short enough and controlled enough by me that I never had the same sort of anxiety that I have now with the thesis.

It is, of course, totally possible that I was this anxious in high school and have repressed it. For reasons that mystify me, I really don’t remember very much about large portions of high school. I know that I had huge emotional peaks and troughs in short periods of time (both because I’ve seen it confirmed in photos and old gchats and because I was  16 and that’s how 16-year-olds work), but I truly don’t remember most of it.

I was in the car today and I was trying to remember who I ate lunch with during my freshman year of high school, and realized that I couldn’t. I know that these things meant a huge amount to me at the time, and I can’t remember them now. I assume that this thesis stress will be the same in four years in my memories.

I think this weird holding pattern will continue until I leave Atlanta. There are too many competing parts of my life in too small a chunk of space, and it makes me itchy. I love the city, but at the very least I need to move to a different chunk of it post-grad. I’m a little bit done with this particular five-mile patch of earth.

I am back in Atlanta after spending a week in the hills (near where FDR died in the arms of his mistress) with some of the other folks in my scholarship program. Though I’m not totally sure what that particular retreat is supposed to accomplish other than making all of Emory’s merit aid recipients tremendously fat on southern food, I am in no way complaining. There was muscadine ice cream! And viking bocce!

It’s called kubb. No, really. It was insane, as games invented in cultures that don’t have balls are wont to be.

The basic premise is that you divide into two teams. Each team takes six foot-long wooden dowels and attempts to chuck them underhand so as to knock over five stubby little blocks on the other team’s side. After that, they attempt to knock over a taller block (the “king”) in the middle of the field. It is not difficult to understand once you get the hang of it.

It is, however, really difficult to play. The other set of teams seemed to have no problem throwing the dowels with stunning accuracy, but my team and our opponents were definitely the JV kubb team. In the time the other team played three rounds, we managed one.

However, because our faculty supervisor was similarly not-that-competative, he humored me enough to look up YouTube footage of the kubb world championships. We took a break to watch a bunch of drunken Scandinavians playing competitive lawn darts, because that is what technology is for.

Though I still think the game would be much improved with the addition of whiffle ball bats (fling the blocks down with the power of your overhand!) it was a pleasant way to spend the few hours we had in between our gigantic Southern breakfast and our gigantic Southern lunch. (In between gigantic Southern lunch and gigantic Southern dinner, I napped. One has to conserve energy.)

Other highlights of the weekend included hanging out with the child that I baby sit for while she showed me her “apathetic dinosaur” dance and discussed her dissatisfaction with the ending of Black Beauty (she feels that it is insufficiently clear). There was also a terrible dance contest between some friends and myself. I wore a fez and was roundly judged by some freshmen, as is my way.

I returned home today to swap out clothes in preparation for housesitting (and catsitting, thus the photo) for my parents while they are galavanting around Italy for a week. (Super jealous.) I was glad to have the excuse to head out, as in the three days that my room was unoccupied I appear to have picked up quite the infestation of fleas. Just the welcome home a girl dreams of–literal ankle biters.

This weekend, though perfectly pleasant, was a nice reminder that I’m kind of completely done with my investment in my university. Folks were having very passionate debates about university policy, and I cannot bring myself to care because I will not be there in a year. I think that that’s healthy. I cared very much when I was younger, and now I am focused on other things. Perhaps my mood will shift as the year wears on/I recover the blood I lost from fleas.

Until then, I’m going to cuddle with my parents’ cat.

1. Do I want to do this research? I don’t want to do this research. I signed up because of parental pressure!
2. I can’t write anything this long. I can’t write. I have forgotten how to type and my fingers are numb, because I am an idiot. I bet they teach you how to type in SURE.*
3. The IRB is going to read my sad application for approval, track me down while I’m trying to flintknap in the Anthropology moat**, and break my kneecaps with a bat. I deserve this.

These meetings! Not reassuring! I left the one today resolved to quit writing my thesis and, I don’t know, go commit ritual seppuku. (Or just take eight credit hours this semester and call it good. But that would be sad.)

After this particular meeting, I left feeling like I was perhaps an idiot for not taking my graduate-level course this semester, as my department will be offering two–yes, two–graduate courses next semester. One of which we are not allowed to take, as we are not real graduate students and it is a core course. (The other is in paleolithic technologies, which is awesome, but… unlikely to relate to Facebook.)

None of this is related to my advisor (wonderful!) or the department undergrad wrangler (hilarious! And vaguely reminiscent of Kathy Reichs!). But I feel like every other student in that room has had an undergraduate research experience very much related to their (very scientific) topic of choice, and has learned the analytical skills that the department does not otherwise give its undergraduates. And that freaks me out.

But seriously? There was no way that I could have done that. I was at the wee campus for two years, and then I was in Senegal for half of last year. Even if I had made broader connections in this department, it wouldn’t matter because straight up half the faculty are on sabbatical next semester.

I’m freaking out a little, is what I’m saying. And I do not feel prepared.

To calm myself, I think I’m going to make a thesis outline.

1. Literature Review
2. Research
3. ????
4. Profit!

Seems legit. Right? Totally.

If you need me, I’ll be in the moat.

* I found the ugliest site on the Emory official domain! I win!

** It’s where the trees are on the left. It’s covered in broken volcanic glass and moose antlers.