On grad school, blogging, online crushes, and books

I've finished and submitted my application for the New School for Social Research. All that's left is the FAFSA once I get my W2s in from my old employers. Once that's submitted all I have to do is wait. I'm applying to the Liberal Studies program, which does not include a class on Wigs and Modernist Discourse or anything like that I promise. It's essentially a cultural studies program, and I will have the option, should I be accepted, of working with the anthropology faculty to tailor my Master's program to better equip me for a Ph.D. in anthropology, which is what I've decided I want to do. I was going to apply to UC Davis, going so far as to get recommendations and work on the application, until, after hearing back from current students, I decided that I was not ready for a seven-year, self-directed doctoral program. I think the Davis program would be great, but I think I need to build up more of a theoretical foundation before I apply. So, rather than applying directly to doctoral programs as was my original plan (a symptom of the 'I want to get on with my life' crisis I had back in October), I'm sticking to Master's programs, which will help me transition into a doctoral program in Cultural Anthropology. I want to go to the New School, it's my top-choice, but sometimes I feel pressure to apply to somewhere more 'prestigious,' which I'll probably do next year if I don't get in and get a good financial package to NSSR. Numerically/academically, I'm competitive for Duke or Columbia, but I decided against applying this year because I was concerned that I didn't research the programs enough and that I was applying based on the name only and not necessarily because I wanted to work with the professors there. I very well may want to, but because I hadn't done enough research, I didn't want to apply this time around. Also, I'm concerned that my desire to go to a big name school might be rooted in a desire to be important, and I'm not sure that that's healthy. I'm working on it. God, I probably sound pompous, so I should really stop this train of thought.

So one of the several impetuses to my renewed desire to blog has been my new online friend/crush who I've been talking to (read: annoying the shit out of) recently and whose blog I read in its entirety one cold weekend morning over coffee, essentially like a novel, and thoroughly enjoyed. It was strange reading three years of someone's life in one morning, almost sensory overload, but, like a good novel, a lot of what he wrote challenged me and my ideas and complimented thought processes/beliefs/opinions that I've held over the past couple of years. Anyway, he's a quite good and honest writer, and I've linked to his blog in my recommended reading section to the right. He may see this and be even more creeped out than he probably already is, but read his blog, and you'll probably form a cyber-crush on him and then blog about it too. It's in the G's.

I've been reading a lot in general, and barely watching any television, of which I'm glad. In the past month or so, I've read Yukio Mishima's Spring Snow, Bret Easton Ellis' Rules of Attraction, Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, Laurie Moore's Birds of America, and parts of The Portable Atheist. I can highly recommend each of the books in that list except for Rules of Attraction, which was okay, but don't rush out and get it immediately. I read it in a day and a half, and while it was engaging, it was tedious, and the characters were completely unsympathetic. I understand that was the point, the criticism of eighties' excess that it is, but it was frustrating, and I can't say that I liked it. I also can't say I hated it, but if the best it can wrest from me is ambivalence, then I probably could have spent that time with another book.

I'm currently reading In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan and more of The Portable Atheist.

I have a lot more that I could update you (my two or so readers) with, but I'll save that for later. Maybe I'll continue blogging. I'll be more of an exhibitionist and not just a voyeur.