Tuesday Questions: Missing the Memo Edition
I was supposed to dislike graduate school. Graduate School allegedly sucks all the joy out of learning and turns people into nothings who look at things through a microscopic lens. I was also supposed to find law school completely unpleasant and filled with ultra-competitive people who would cut each other to find the case first. Lastly, I am not supposed to like practicing law because law is a profession for people who don’t know what else to do in life and are completely unhelpful and productive members of society. We also all burn out and become substance abusers allegedly.
These are only a few sample essays or pieces of fictional narrative of many. Some are old but continue circulating around the Internet. And every single time, I missed the memo.
I really liked graduate and law school. Learning amuses me. I did not necessarily like every class I took in either or all my professors. There were certainly times when the administration did not know what to do with me because I was a “model student but problematic director” in the words of one higher-up. End of semester was always stressful with multiple finals and projects but it was never the absolute misery I’ve seen described in don’t go to graduate school arguments. What’s wrong with being able to spend your days talking about art, ideas, literature, law, philosophy with people? That sounds pretty cool to me.
I always felt like a lot of the stress people went through in graduate school and law school is stuff that they did to themselves. You don’t actually have to stay up for 24 hours when given a 24 hour final. It can probably be finished in 14-16 hours of solid work. All nighters are usually more of a sign of bad project management than anything else and also a strange sense of pride.
And while I am not always pleased and sometimes very stressed about how my law career is unfolding because of the law crisis/crunch, I still like the practice of law. The work is interesting and I do feel like I am being productive and helping people.
When have you missed the memo? What were things you were supposed to dislike and find unbearable but you found relatively stress-free and enjoyable?
Other than the tuition thing, I could happily spend the rest of my life collecting terminal masters degrees. OTOH, I have learned that my friends with PhDs were right when they told me, “We all know you can do the original research, Mike, but you lack the tolerance for academic BS required to get a PhD.”Report
@michael-cain
I could also spend my life getting masters degrees or just reading in a library 🙂
As for a PhD, my classmates thought I had it in me but I wonder if I could write a 200 page book.Report
I think in a past life I would have made a good monk- if I could spend my life in a library reading and studying, it would be bliss.
Well, aside from the whole celibacy thing.Report
Luckily I’m Jewish, we don’t do the whole celibacy thing 🙂Report
Intentionally, anyway.Report
Oh thank god.
I had the exact same joke – right down to the wording – but was worried that it would come across as jerky rather than jokey and cancelled the post.
But as a great Jaybird once said: the joke not made eats at the soul.Report
Glyph,
It would appear your sense of “I shouldnt’ say that” is set way way higher than mine.
(I made a joke about Alzheimers… well, I thought it was pretty funny, at least).Report
@glyph
Do you know who else eats the soul?
Lawyers 🙂Report
In my experience, the hard part is keeping it at 200 (or 300, or 400) pages. That old adage about “not having enough time/skill to write something shorter” applies.Report
Gab,
yeah, that’s why the standard advice is to write for Analog or one of the other short story mags. They’ll help you learn what to cut, and what’s (barely!) salvageable.
It’s a lot harder to do a short story well.Report
@gabriel-controy That was not my experience — I had to scratch and scrape to get the page count up to a respectable level (and a lot of it was just lists of examples from various dialects). But then all through my schooling I struggled to reach the target page count for papers, so this should not have been a surprise to me.Report
As for a PhD, my classmates thought I had it in me but I wonder if I could write a 200 page book.
Writing a 200-page dissertation is both harder and easier than writing a 200-page novel. The dissertation typically follows a fixed structure and requires a lot of… not boilerplate exactly, but details. Like methodology. Lots and lots of words to explain details so readers know that you didn’t make some subtle (or not-so-subtle) mistake. To make a (ridiculous) comparison, in a sword-and-sorcery novel, the heroine uses the tricky maneuver her fencing-master uncle taught her as a girl in the first chapter to win a climactic fight. Maybe it’s a page in the first chapter and a paragraph in the last one. As part of a dissertation on combat with swords, it would go on for many pages as you demonstrate that the footwork works, the timing works, that it doesn’t depend on the opponent doing something incredibly stupid, that it doesn’t depend on the young woman having a wrist that bends the wrong way, and on and on.
Not that dissertations have to be that long. The program where I got my first masters had an instance of a 20-page dissertation. Most of that was the minimal boilerplate that has to be included; the important part was a five-page proof of an important theorem (the guy had had a brilliant insight into a previously unsolved problem).Report
@lwa
“It’s Patty who chose a life of celibacy. Selma simply had celibacy thrust upon her.”
–Marge Simpson, “Principal Charming”Report
Scarlet,
I’ve been reading a webnovel where people are named after virtues. So the image of Celibacy being thrust on her (perhaps by a timely push to his tush), is hilarious. Oh, the expressions!Report
@kenb
It might depend partially on the discipline. Is yours linguistics?
For history, there is–at least for me–the temptation to want to display all my research and go into every (or almost every) nuance of every (or almost every) source or factual point. That’s a recipe for overwriting. However, maybe it depends. I’ve known a couple people who’ve written history dissertations of less than 200 pages and theirs are usually much better, or at least more readable, than mine.Report
Just publish the papers. Eventually, someone will give you a PhD whether you’ve earned one or not.
You may even be able to get serfs — erm, grad students.Report
The problem with that is that the stuff is spread across a bizarre batch of inter-disciplinary topics. Five odd sorts of math applied to an analog signal analysis problem. Pieces from all over computer science applied to a previously unsolvable telecommunications problem. Dithering algorithms from typography applied to streaming video over the internet. A first-of-its-kind internet test-and-measurement tool (Microsoft is currently infringing on the patent from that one, but the corporate holders of the patent rights don’t care). Currently a long-term political prediction that draws on a wide range of social science stuff.Report
It sometimes seems like IEEE has a white paper on anything…
And there’s no shame in asking one of the math folks around here to help edit, particularly if you’re trying to put something multidisciplinary into a math journal (I know a guy who doesn’t really understand group theory terribly well, but has managed to publish really important papers using it. I guess intuition and a skeptical eye will get you pretty far)Report
Most of it’s fallen prey to “technology marches on” since it was done. The telecommunications solution did get published in a special-topic issue of IEEE Spectrum and a couple of conferences (Al Aho, then a computer science demi-god, stopped me at one of the conferences and said, “Best paper of the conference, no question” — made my year). I’ve got no serious complaints — I had a 25-year career where I got to ask and occasionally answer interesting questions. While I may dabble in some of that from time to time — I’m working slowly on proving a small theorem that would be publishable, but of narrow interest — I’m mostly interested in quite different questions these days.
Minions would be nice, though.Report
terminal masters degrees
Still working on my MSVT100.Report
Mystery Science Vocational Theater?Report
I thought the VT100 was a DEC product, not Microsoft.Report
It would appear your sense of “I shouldnt’ say that” is set way way higher than mine.
No comment.Report
It wasn’t me who released the Ferengi Pregnancy Contract to the Mens Rights Advocates…
they loved it, of course.
[yes, of course the “real one” — those Star Trek writers loved backstory!]Report
I found getting my Master’s Degree quite enjoyable. Postgraduate study is when you get to learn the good stuff.Report
Nickleback.Report
@kazzy
This might be the most controversial thing ever said on OT!
Well maybe after the Rush-hating essay.Report
So you’re the guy!Report
@kazzy
man, i thought you went to enough of those social justice pedagogy things that you would have learned how much it can hurt people to say hateful things around them, even if you’re joking.
it’s not ok.Report
Who are you even?Report
I’m not the only one.
Unless you think my basement is full of NB albums…Report
“Unless you think my basement is full of NB albums…”
well, i do *now*.Report
They make great stocking stuffers.
Especially if you repeatedly stuff your own stocking.Report
Is that what the kids call it these days?Report
Alley-oop!Report
Nickelback, as in what you get when you buy something that costs 95 cents and you pay with a dollar.Report
@scarletnumbers
Also what you get if you fall backward into a pool of molten nickel.Report
I enjoyed my teenage years, and high school and university. I’ve never had a job, an employer, an apartment, or a roommate that I hated.
I’ve been incredibly fortunate.Report
Billions of people on the planet, somebody has to draw a natural straight flush.Report
GET HERReport
What were things you were supposed to dislike and find unbearable but you found relatively stress-free and enjoyable?
The more interesting question would be: what were things you were supposed to enjoy, but instead disliked and found unbearable?Report
My answer for this is dance clubs which I find too loud, too many lights, and not my kind of music.
Watching professional sports as well usually. I find it kind of dull especially football where two minutes seems to take fifteen years to complete.
Also Vodka, Tecquila, and doing shots in general.
I find the concept of strip clubs to be a waste of money. The neo-burlesque movement is also kind of odd because I associate burlesque as a kind of entertainment my great-grandfathers were supposed to enjoy and it seems odd that a combination of slight flirtation with really corny jokes is making a comeback as a feminist performance art form.Report
First, what we have is right now; this moment. Embrace it. Whomever’s sending out memos discouraging anyone from the joy of now suffers the damnation of hell now.
Second, learning is what we’re meant for, that’s why we have these giant brains. It saddens me that so often we think learning (and love of) should be constrained to schools, childhood and young-adult years, and that it’s a bore/chore/burden.Report
Various foods with (to me) inexplicable orthodoxies about how one isn’t supposed to enjoy them – fruitcake, brussels sprouts…
Also, any insights gained through psychedelic drugs are supposed to be scare-quote “insights” that can’t be usefully applied or even remembered once one is sober. I apparently missed the memo on that one.
Winter, cold weather, shovelling snow, all that sort of business – the accepted default conversation during a cold snap seems to be to complain bitterly about the weather, wonder why anyone moved to this godforsaken desert of snow, and take dingy concrete tunnels around downtown even if they triple the distance walked compared to walking outside. I quite enjoy being dressed for the cold and going out in it.Report
Also, any insights gained through psychedelic drugs are supposed to be scare-quote “insights” that can’t be usefully applied or even remembered once one is sober.
Really? I never heard that, I thought that most people conceded at least the possibility of useful lasting small-‘e’-epiphany (though certainly in many specific instances people have been known to glimpse something that seemed profound, only to lose a grip on it upon re-entry; or realize it wasn’t as profound as it seemed at the time).Report
@dragonfrog @glyph
Obligatory video of a 1950s housewife on LSD:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g53pSV25Q8Report
@dragonfrog – you might enjoy this, a trip report on iboga.
https://www.erowid.org/columns/teafaerie/2014/12/18/hard-reset/
I really like this gal’s writing; she’s whipsmart and not heavily-wedded to any single specific interpretation of the psychedelic experience (that is, there’s talk of plant teachers and Akasha and the like, but there’s also talk of neurological/psychological phenomena and hard drive defrag and search engines; using each side to conceptually illuminate the other), delivered with lots of gentle self-deprecating humor and warm empathy. Psychedelic experiences are notoriously hard to put into words but she does a bang-up job. I always enjoy her stuff.Report
I forgot to get screwed up by my parents’ divorce.Report
Intentionally, anyway.
(What? It worked for Schilling).Report
Protip: There’s stuff that only works for Chris Rock, too.Report
Oh no… they tried! Got my three siblings good. Just missed the mark on me.Report
@mike-schilling
You can have a monopoly on Bar Mitzvah jokes.Report
“There’s three other Bar Mitzvah safaris ahead of us.”Report
Mine: Grocery shopping.Report
You like it or dislike it? At its/my best, I love it. At its/my worst, its just another thing to do.Report
Love it.Report
When I have the time (and money), I love to just wander the aisles at the nicer grocery stores and just get inspired. Double-bonus-points if I have Mayo with me, as I can start to share this most enjoyable of pastimes with him.Report
The latest Hobbit movie.
To be clear, it’s not that I thought it was good, it’s just that I thought it was going to be completely unbearable and it turned out to be mildly entertaining. My low expectations helped me to just accept it for what it was.Report
Good news, since that’s the best I’m hoing for.Report
It’s another step on the whole digital-world thing. It can’t disappoint me if the CGI is good enough. I have a couple of bets with people that we’ll live long enough to see the first Oscar for best synthetic actor/actress awarded.Report
If AIs are passing the turing test, yeah, that might not be too far behind. But… it is the internet. I assume there are better ways to make money (or contribute to the body of knowledge on the ‘net) than acting.Report
Does an actor delivering lines written by another person, with all sorts of direction (emotion, lighting, camera angles) by a third person, pass the Turing test?Report
Michael,
depends on everyone involved. Arnold Schwarzenegger only passes the turing test when the director bothers to kick his lazy ass into shape.Report
I still think the Green Lantern movie was okay.Report
On a family trip to Europe when I was about eleven years old, we stayed a night with a friend of my father’s in Czechoslovakia. For dinner, they served us some sort of meat that I didn’t recognize, but I tried it and it wasn’t horrible, so I ate it up. My siblings stared at me in surprise and some horror, and they later informed me that that meat was (OMG!) liver.Report
Repetitive non-challenging mental work.
You know all those worksheets you get in school? I *loved* those. I would get as excited over getting one as a present as other kids got about candy.Report
For me, word problems in math. Math had been pure drudgery, memorize rules and (at least for me) practice procedures past the point of boredom. Then… two trains leave different cities at the same time… OMG! You could describe the world! You could answer useful questions!Report
Repetitive non-challenging mental work.
You know all those worksheet books you get in school? I *loved* those. I would get as excited over getting one as a present as other kids got about candy.Report
Repetitive posting as well?Report
And here I was thinking that I caught it just in time.Report
😉Report
Do we have any better information on what sort of problems are affecting the site?Report
Are you still having issues? The only ongoing thing I have noticed is that it seems to take a little bit longer, once you hit “post”, for the action to complete.
I suspect they’ve either beefed up the spam filter, or it is working harder than it used to.Report
Occasionally the post takes, but I get back a partial page (fancy layout missing) and a 404 error. My suspicion is actually that there’s a link to the provider of some Javascript library(ies) and that provider is having problems.Report
Huh, I have had no issues like that, site seems to be behaving normally for me (Firefox on Mac) except for, as I said, comment posting seems to take a bit longer than it used to.
Dumb question, but did you ever clear your browser cache and reload? The site-down issue the other day as I understand it was a DDOS against the hosting servers (not against this site specifically), and I needed to do that after it came back up for things to sort out for me.Report
Same Firefox-on-Mac kit here. I’ve flushed everything up to and including local DNS cache. Most of the site is behaving normally — loads at reasonable speed, has the occasional case of the newest entries in “Gifts of Gab” not being included in the loaded version of the page they refer to. Submitted comments always seem to go into the database, just that infrequent incomplete layout and 404 message. If it happens again, I’ll make a note of the URL generating the 404.Report