I don't have many regrets in my life. You live, you learn, you make mistakes, you acquire experience.
So I got married way too early to the wrong person. But it allowed me to understand a lot about who I am and what I need in life, what kind of a relationship can make me happy.
So I went to the wrong graduate school. But I met some people who are crucial to my life there. I also discovered what kind of academic I never want to become and how not to treat students, which is a very valuable negative experience.
So I frittered a lot of money on expensive vacations when I was in the initial stages of grad school and got into debt as a result. But I had tons of fun and got to see the world. Now I can talk to my students about the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution as somebody who knows first-hand what she is talking about.
So I wasted a lot of time on friends I had nothing in common with. But that gave me enough stories to keep blogging for years to come.
There is one huge regret I can't get rid of, though. And it's that I didn't start blogging a lot sooner. I was very lonely in the first year of my doctoral program. There was literally nobody worthwhile to talk to. And then there were the years of moving around constantly. Getting used to living in an entirely new place so often is really hard. You feel like there is no continuity in your life when there is a new environment, a new place of abode, a new group of colleagues as often as I experienced it. How great would it have been to have a blog like this one where intelligent people from all over the world come to discuss things, express their opinions, argue, and have fun? How could I not have discovered blogging sooner? Stupid, stupid Clarissa.
5 comments:
On the plus side, you don't have any embarrassing posts you wrote as a sophomore. :P
I'm getting really curious about those embarrassing posts you keep referring to. :-) Feel free to leave links. Maybe we should all go read them and judge for ourselves. :-) :-)
Kidding!!!
The Internet was really cool in 1999 through 2003 when access to it was limited to interesting people.
Now everyone is on here revealing to me they live the same mundane life that I do.
I think it was the fact that images, video, and sound were not mainstream mediums of communication. All you had was text. Whatever the person on the other end of the line typed left me to use my imagination to fill out the rest, which was cool.
Now everyone posts pictures and video of their own boring suburban or urban space. It's like, wow they have pavement in Laos too? So do we!
Now I've been reduced to looking around for eccentric people.....which is how I ended up here. Hehe. Like attracts like or something like that.
I love being called eccentric!!! Thanks!!!! :-)
I have learned about the joys of blogging at Yale in an awesome seminar on the Latin American dictator novel. You should have taken that seminar, thus perhaps liking Yale a little bit more and starting your blog years ago.
Ol.
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