Back in Action

Well, it's 2012 CE and I am back on the internet dot com.

As some of you may have noticed, my blog was briefly accessible only to authorized users. This was due to a slightly panicky shutdown following the posting of my last post. I suddenly doubted both the veracity of what I was saying in that post, and my willingness to share it with the world. (I mean, literally, potentially, the world. Still a feat of imagination to remember this.) I may yet go over to a slightly restricted access model for this blog, so as to feel less foolish and more secure posting my personal thoughts when I actually have a pretty good idea who I want to read them, and who is interested, by the by.

Anyways, reading over that last post again today, I see that though there is good spots re: overcommitment, I was pretty much on the money in my doubts -- namely, that I was in an overreaction mode as I finished up the incredibly challenging and Resistance-provoking task of the semester and the BA more broadly.

The BA was like a 3 year bootcamp for me. That's a long bootcamp. Bootcamp is where you are pushed way beyond any possibility of comfort, regularity, balance, or even normal (self-)discipline. You are supposed to break, at least a little.

When you come through, you say to yourself: Well now I can do anything.

So yes, what I wrote in my last post about autonomy and the impossibility of living harmoniously during my BA was true, I think, but also: that's the terrain. It sucks, but life isn't always easy. For goodness' sake, I have been so immensely blessed in my life, it's okay to have some metaphorical 'warzones' sometimes.

Should university, and the undergraduate experience, be structured in such a way as to "break" brilliant if soft-spined students like myself? Probably not. It's hardly an ideal educational environment.

But stepping back from ideals for a moment: I want education, I want vocation, I want schooling and smarts and experiences that the BA will help me get. (I've applied to a Master's degree, and if not this one, I'll almost certainly take another at some point in the near future.) I needed -- I mean, my mind needed to get jiggy with the scientific method, with cultural studies, with history, with psychological theory, with philosophy and classics and cognitive science. And in the deeply flawed pedagogical universe we live in, McGill is not such a bad place to get down.

So!

Coming out of school is a thaw, a physical, emotional, creative thaw. The shackles are loosened, the blinders are removed (these I wish I'd put on earlier in the process, really, the better to charge on through), and I'm a little unsteady on my feet... I've been here before, but what... is this place??