End of Teaching

Today was the last day of teaching for this semester. Since I won't be teaching next semester, the earliest that I will teach again is next September. If I am too behind on my PhD, not even then, which means I might not teach for the rest of my time as a PhD student.
I had a good crop of students this time, not super-bright but very keen and no trouble at all. They responded well to me and I would even venture to say that some of them were sad to see the  last of me. As I have written earlier, while teaching this semester, I discovered a kindness and generosity that I never knew I had. I have always thought of myself as someone who doesn't suffer fools gladly (as arrogant as that sounds), but while teaching you inevitably get a load of foolish questions. For the most part, I dealt with them without getting irritated or belittling the person asking the question.In any case, brightness is, to a certain extent and especially in the social sciences, in the eye of the beholder. It has happened too often that someone I consider bright has been full of praise for someone I had dismissed as not-so-bright.

High Highs, Low Lows

I was talking to a friend about how happy winning the prize made me. When you are so emotionally invested in your work, the highs send you soaring and the lows send you to the pits of despair. Maybe I am over-exaggerating the intensity of my emotions. I am not Vincent Van Gogh, and I am highly unlikely to cut my ear off.
But, the point remains that the lows have been bruising, especially the first time someone attacked my work. I moped for weeks afterwards. As a PhD student, one feels small and insignificant most of the time, even someone like me whose is disposed towards overconfidence rather than diffidence. Even overconfidence needs some legs to stand on, and those legs cannot always be in our own head. Outward recognition is like manna from heaven.  

Winning

So, this time I won the prize and praise yesterday, and I have been basking in the joy of it ever since. Its not a huge prize and it was shared with someone else but I am quite pleased with myself and have no shame saying so. I told quite a few people about it. Some years ago, faux modesty would have stopped me from doing so. I would have wanted these people to know but would have preferred someone else tell them on my behalf so that I could seem successful and nonchalant at the same time.
This time, I feel  really happy and have no shame in showing it. I care much less about whether it will seem like I am gloating or if it arouses envy in some of the people I tell. I have written about schadenfreude before and how I frequently find myself indulging in it. But, just as it is possible to sympathize with someone's misfortune and yet enjoy having a companion in misfortune, it is possible to feel happy for someone while being slightly envious of them.
I worked hard for this prize and feel I deserve it. I am under no illusion that my work is unquestionably amazing and above reproach. It is rare to find such work in the social sciences, and my prize-winning work had previously come in for some sharp criticism. I am sure that a number of people disagree with my work and felt it was undeserving of the prize, but had the good grace to keep those opinions to themselves. A fundamental learning in academia is the realization that just because you don't see the value of something doesn't mean it is not of value. In such situations, the prudent reaction is to assume that you didn't understand it or you come from an opposing school of thought and move on. I love the phrase--'But, what do I know?". This is particularly important for early-career researchers especially, who are seldom asked to formally assess someone else's work.

Platonic Friendships

This morning, I read a column about a platonic friendship ruined by an attempt to define it precisely by one of the  parties. The woman, who is slim and attractive (I googled her) and the man is a bear, at least going by the description of him in the article. The two share an intense friendship for years, while the woman is in an on-off relationship with an alpha male who sounds like jerk. At one point, the woman asks her friend if he is in love with her, to which he responds with an offended 'No'. Their relationship is never the same after that. The woman says its was difficult for her to conceive of a relationship with a man that didn't involve romance or sex.
While the article was about how some relationships fall in the grey area between friendship and romance, I was more interested in the differences in the level of physical attractiveness between the two. It is easy to be friends with someone you are not physically attracted to or with someone you are attracted to but is unavailable. The question is can you be friends with someone you are physically attracted to and who is single and available? Do we tend to assume that if two people of the opposite (or same) sex are friends, the less hot friend is secretly in love with the hotter one? The piece doesn't make mention of the man's sexuality but if he was heterosexual, kudos to him for being clear about he felt about his female friend and for respecting their relationship enough not to make a pass at her. Straight men are socially conditioned to pursue attractive women irrespective of whether they feel an emotional connection with them. Resisting that pressure is not easy.

Dressing Up and Private Worlds

I was talking to my sister last night and she told me that my younger nephew had dressed up as a spy after watching a spy movie. I asked her if he did that often, and she replied not as often as I used to . And, that was all the excuse I needed to go running down memory lane. I am such a sucker for nostalgia!
Growing up, I used to love collecting sticks and dressing up as fictional characters. I liked sticks because of their sheer versatility--a stick could be anything from a sword to a gun depending on thee character I was playing. My collection of sticks was so large that it occupied a good portion of the verandah of our apartment. There were many sticks that I never played with but kept because I liked having the possibility of playing with them.
My love of dressing up and play-acting was unusual because I had no ambitions of becoming an actor or a novelist/playwright. The fantasy worlds that my imagination conjures up are private and always have been--even when the fantasies are not sexual. I don't let anyone into those worlds, not even those people that play roles in my world. They are my private retreat, the place I go to when I need a break from the world or sometimes for no particular reason.

And, therein lies the difference between me and my nephew. Fortunately, camera phones didn't yet exist when I was growing up. The thought of photographs of  me in the full costume of whichever character I was playing is mortifying. My private worlds were not meant to be documented for posterity. My nephew on the other hand was only to happy to pose for my sister. He is a born performer and loves the spotlight.

Over the years my frequency of fantasizing has decreased remarkably. As one grows up, the nature of fantasies changes, they become less fantastical and more realistic, or at least that is what has happened in my case. Sometimes, these new fantasies bring up feelings of guilt and bitterness, especially when they are not borne out in real life. But, as I have written before, fantasies are not supposed to be a blueprint for real life but flights of imagination.

Winter

I was talking with my sister a few weeks ago and she said buildings lose their heat gradually as summer turns to autumn and then to winter. At the time, I didn't give it much thought but maybe there is some truth in it. I have been using my summer duvet(with a mattress protector as an extra blanket) for weeks now. My thumb rule was to only change to my winter duvet if the night low was well below 5C. I would also leave my window open by an inch or so. 

Over the past few nights my window was shut and last night, I changed to my winter duvet in the early hours of the morning as I was cold. And, last night was not a very cold night, with a low of  just 7C or so. Maybe, my house has finally used up the heat it had stored up during the summer. Winter is here.

The weather continues to be rainy and windy. I feel like I am on the brink of a cold for more than a week now. I don't feel as energetic as usual and neither am I sick. Maybe its just the dampness getting to me. And I have a newfound appreciation and the burst of energy that it unleashes in me. My summer exercise routine was significantly more intensive than it is now. 

Sick Day

So today I decided to stay at home for the second consecutive day. I was feeling a little under the weather and there was a vile wind outside. Since I didn't want to fall sick before my  conference in Edinburgh next week, I thought I would lie low. I am also a little paranoid about falling sick, and dose up on Vitamin C and Paracetemol at the first signs of indisposition. I suppose a more chill person would have shrugged it off and left it to fate to either make them sick or pull them out of the physical funk. But, yesterday, I heard my  yoga teacher say to someone else "We don't listen to our bodies when they whisper, so we are forced to listen when they scream". Since I didn't have to be at uni today, I thought why not stay at home. I love the term "under the weather" which is too British to use anywhere else without inviting frowns of incomprehension or disapproval. It conveys perfectly the physical state that between rude health and sickness.