Falling On My Pen

[qos]

The bloody paper was due at 7pm not 8pm.
The WebCT site no longer allows the assignment to be uploaded.
I have emailed it to my prof.

I've been saying for the past couple of months that this is a period of discernment, that I needed to complete this quarter of seminary and then spend the summer working on my shamanic studies and doing various kinds of internal checking and external research about what I really need to be doing, before I make a final decision about whether to commit to finishing this degree or not.

But the longer this quarter drags on, the more I feel like I should have taken the advice of the prof I spoke with during the break and simply have withdrawn then.

No, I shouldn't have, because then I might always have wondered if I had done the right thing.

But I am not enjoying this quarter the way I had hoped -- or the way I have enjoyed most of the rest of them. And the longer it drags on the more growly I get. I feel like a tiger in a cage, and it doesn't matter if I'm getting thick slabs of meat pushed through the bars every day. . . I'm blunting my teeth on the bars in my effort to get out and stalk my own food.

Which, come to think of it, is not so inaccurate a metaphor.

Comments

[wlotus.livejournal.com]

Your assertions don't sound arrogant at all. In fact, they sound a lot like my reasons for discontinuing my masters in electrical engineering. I want to learn, yes, but learning according to the prescription of standard academia had me wallowing in too much information which is utterly useless to me. I can learn what I am interested in learning without going the formal academic path to do so, and I will be much better off for it, in the long run. It's about following my instinct, not following someone else's definition of what theories I "should" know in order to be worthy of digging further into what I want to know.

[qos.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the affirmation -- and I didn't know that about your own academic choice.

This is a big transition for me, since I have so strongly identified with and been successful in academic life.

But there is something very positive about claiming my own authority!