Doctors and Doctorates

So, long time no update. Life has been pretty good of late. I have more friends in the area, polo is going well and taking up a lot of my time. Alexander is in Boston which is lame, but we've done the long distance summer thing before and I'm going to visit him in less than two weeks! I'm very very excited. Of course mostly to see him but I've also never been to Boston before, or Massachusetts at all (no offense, people who live there, but that is just the dumbest of the state names). Apparently he has all sorts of things planned out for us but I won't find out till I get there. Cannot wait!

The one big stressful thing in my life currently is this whole grad school deal. I finally started looking in-depth at programs and so far have a few I really like. Namely: UC Davis, UNC Chapel Hill, Bucknell (PA), and Macquarie University (Sydney). I'm not done looking yet and I'm not really sure how to find more or narrow down, all of these were picked by looking at what research the professors were doing. The real problem is that only one of them is in a city that I really want to live in, and that's Sydney. I want to live near the ocean. I just do. UC Davis is only a couple of hours away and I hear very good things about the city, but Bucknell is in a landlocked state and Chapel Hill is not even really day-trip distance from the beach. I know this may seem like a silly requirement and it isn't one really but I just feel happier when I can swim in the ocean, or at least see it. I don't know why, I'm just drawn to it and I've lived smack dab in the middle of the continent my whole life. I know I posted on my other blog about this at some point but honestly Sydney is the only city I've ever been in and thought "Yeah, I want to live here." There are a lot of other places that I like, don't get me wrong, but Sydney is the only one I've ever actually felt strongly drawn to. Which is a problem, because it is a million zillion miles away from everyone I care about. I really liked the research they were doing, I love the city, it's on the ocean, it's near the mountains, it's in Australia...but 2-6 years that far away from everyone? I have no idea how to make that kind of decision. I have always been terrible at decision making and my basic strategy is to ask everyone I know what their opinion is and then do whatever I was going to do in the first place. Getting more perspective does help, it often helps me realize what I really feel and what's important, but sometimes it makes it worse. I've only brought it up with a couple of people but so far it's only made it more confusing. Either they've said "Oh that would be so cool, you should totally do it! The loneliness will be worth it" in which case my reaction is "but but but EVERYONE I know will be so far away. For YEARS. I can't do that!" or they will say "Yeah, I mean, that sounds cool but I couldn't do it, it would be too rough and I couldn't be that far away for that long." In which case my response is "But I want to! I'm not going to chicken out just because it will be hard!" So, yeah. Not helping. I have no idea what to do to make this decision, other than look more closely at the programs, email professors, and that sort of thing, which should really be my next step anyway but is awfully scary because then it's less theoretical.

 The other big thing in my life has been doctor visits. I don't know why but since I've moved here things that have always sort of been a problem but not that medically significant (so I thought) have finally seemed worth mentioning to a doctor. For instance, I've been given a lot of shit over the years about how often I fall asleep during other things. Alexander says in the almost year and a half we've been together he can count on one hand the number of times I've stayed awake through a whole movie with him, no matter what time of day it is. I slept through classes in high school and college, even though I was taking notes, chewing gum, jiggling my foot, and drinking water I just could not force myself to stay awake. I pass out in the car, I fall asleep in public sometimes, often I have trouble getting through more than a page or two before I pass out when I just want to read...it's frustrating. In college I figured it was because I never slept enough. I don't think there was a week for those four years that I got a good 8 hours every night for 7 nights straight. And in California because we worked in the desert and it was the summer the only way we wouldn't burst into flames during our job was to start work at 2:30 or 3:00am, which meant going to sleep at 6 or 7pm which was just not happening in a house with no AC when I had west-facing windows. There was no way. So I spent the whole summer sleep deprived, too. But now I get seven or eight hours most nights and it still happens. I fall asleep during game sometimes. I fall asleep all the time, and it mostly seems funny or annoying, not like a real medical problem, except that I am a 23 year old woman, not an 80 year old man. So I mentioned it casually to my therapist who told me to talk to my doctor who gave me a little quiz and said I probably had a sleep disorder and needed to see a sleep specialist. I had that appointment today and they want to do an extensive study which would mean me staying there all night covered in electrodes and then all the next day also covered in electrodes to see what's up. Scary and expensive and maybe not worth it, but also, it would be really great if I could just watch a two hour movie with my friends without missing half of it. So. I don't know. First we're trying changing a few simple things and keeping a sleep diary. They even told me to drink coffee which I don't think a doctor has ever told me before. I hope these things work and I don't have to do ridiculous stuff (although, it would be cool if I got to see my brainwaves, and sleep science is really fascinating to me because it doesn't make any sense). It just seems like the silliest problem to have.

 So, that's pretty much my life right now. If you have any advice about grad school or living far away, I would love it. I will probably let you know how Boston goes. So excited! And now I have to get ready to go play polo! It's a hard life, you guys.

Too Much Love to Go Around

So I've figured out my problem. It's not the worst problem to have, but it is frustrating. It turns out that I love too many things. Allow me to explain. This afternoon I biked over to the zoo. I like the Vilas Zoo but it always makes me realize how spoiled I was growing up with the Minnesota zoo, and makes me miss the animals I got to know there the summer I interned, but I digress. While at the zoo I just got this tremendous feeling of excitement. Even seeing a few animals in too-small cages looking bored makes me so happy. I watched the orangutans playing and using the tools in their enclosure for almost an hour. Every exhibit made me want to just jet off to wherever that animal comes from and study it for a year. How stupid I had been, I thought, thinking I should take time off before grad school! I should be in Africa right now studying giraffes! Or lions. Or in Borneo studying orangutans. Or even in Wyoming studying bison or prairie dogs. I resolved to go home and watch Life and start seriously looking at grad school programs.

 On my way out of the zoo I checked my email on my phone, just to see if anything important had come up. I had a reply email from a very prestigious ballroom dance studio that I had recently applied to. I knew from Magpie trying to get a job there that they start out with a quick little dance lesson just to see if you're the kind of person who they want to hire and then they train you for several months and then you get a contract to teach. I got the email at 4:15 and it said I should come to the little intro lesson at 5:15. I have never biked so fast to try to get home, jumped in the shower for long enough to get the sweat off, called to make sure it was okay that I'd be late to what is essentially a job interview, and got there as fast as I could. We did two of my least favorite dances, rumba and salsa (although to be fair, I only don't like salsa because I don't know any moves in it) but it was so fun! I have missed ballroom so so badly. Everyone was great and I love learning new follows and I even lead a little bit and wasn't horrible at it! It turns out that even for the training portion they would want me five nights a week, so I have to put off applying until after polo season ends, which is too bad (although he said they're constantly hiring, so it could be a great thing in the fall!). But at one point while he was talking he mentioned "but you don't need to worry about that unless you're competing, which is 2-4 years down the road". And my heart jumped. Competitive ballroom dancing! I want to do that! Now, I'm not going to say it's impossible to be a wildlife biologist and a competitive ballroom dancer, but it is very difficult and highly unlikely.

I was lead to believe growing up that as you grow up you find that one thing that you love and just want to do forever, work hard to get into that field and be good at it, and then be happy. Not only is it not that simple, but I can't even decide what it is I truly love! I'm sure this is a common problem, and I'd much rather want to do too many things than not really want to do anything, because at least whatever I choose I will be happy. Unless I choose wrong and then am miserable forever. I know, I know, there are no right and wrong choices, there are lots of ways to be happy, you never know how things are going to turn out or why something happens the way it does but I have a hard time making myself believe that. Some people end up with life-long regrets and I don't want to be one of those people. Probably the answer to that is to be the kind of person who doesn't live in the past but makes the best of what they have and keeps moving forward until they find happiness whether or not it's what they set out for but...I don't know, I just want to do well at this whole "life" thing. The other obvious problem is that just about every animal in the zoo made me think "I need to find a program right now where I can go into the wild and study these!" which...I can't. How in the world am I ever going to find grad school programs with interests this broad? I'm most interested in mammals and birds, and I know I want to study behavior and/or hopefully contribute to conservation. How in the world am I supposed to narrow that down? I mean, a lot of people have told me that a good way to find a grad program is to find professors who are doing research you want to be a part of and see if they have space/money for you. I tried writing down all the people I would want to work with from a book that Ken lent me and found that I wrote down just about everyone who wrote an article. I don't know how to even begin to make this decision. I mean, it should be easy, right? If I love so many things I should be happy no matter what? But somehow I fear it won't work out that way. I don't know. Logic and worry have never gone together, I suppose.