Hopefully this is all very amusing in 10 years

Getting a PhD sucks, no doubt about that. On the one hand, enjoying what you're doing requires you (or at least me) to get lost in the work. Thinking about problems, rotating issues in your head all day. On the other hand, you can totally lose yourself in a thought and effort for months this way. It takes a certain kind of person to stick it out in grad school, but even the best student isn't that person every day. Nor should they be, that's why PhD candidates are so much more likely to develop mental disorders (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733317300422).

The paradox is really that you have to be simultaneously completely devoted to your project, while at the same time retaining your sanity and awareness of the world around you. This is especially true for people looking to jump that fence from academic life to work in industry. A postdoc I used to work with told me not to get too invested in your work, because you would never be able to graduate and you'd lose all perspective on skill development needed for life beyond the ivory tower. I'm not really sure how to get satisfaction from my work without obsessing, so I seem to flounder between extreme productivity and deep lulls of apathy.

It's not all bad. I just gave our department seminar and it went really well. There's no reward for that though. I can speak. I can explain. These aren't new skills. It does feel nice to pull everything together into a cohesive narrative arc, but I need to focus on long term goals. Reorient a bit. Isn't that what we're all doing though?

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The Life of Brian

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It's hard to remain optimistic about the nature of man in the face of horrible tragedies like today. There will be a lot of talk about gun control and second amendment rights in the coming days and months, perhaps all the better. Honestly I just don't know where to come down on the issue. It's one of those debates like unions, teachers, and immigration that seem to have no middle ground. Why can't we have common sense gun laws that the NRA and most of my Cambridge neighbors will hate, but everyone else would agree on? Again, I just don't know. I feel as though something should come from this. Twenty kindergartners getting gunned down has to mean something. It has to be more than just one man waking up, aiming to do evil. But then again maybe it's just that. Mankind has free will and twenty kindergartners are now dead. Twenty families are facing the worst Christmas of their lives. A hurricane rolls through and drives us to heroic acts of charity, then toda...

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