dilby

@dilby Ahhh the Call Me By Your Name soundtrack is GOLD.  Sometimes when I'm feeling particularly melancholic and just want to sit in my sadness I watch the end scene where Chalamet is just staring at the fire with tears in his eyes and "Visions of Gideon" plays.  Unreal. 
Andy Shauf is also fantastic.  I quite love the song "The Magician" by him.

If I were to pretend that I actively explore new music rather than simply replaying the Call Me By Your Name soundtrack and Phantom Thread score 4-6 times per day while working, I would recommend Andy Shauf (The Party), Owen Pallett (Heartland) and Miya Folick (Premonitions)

If I were to pretend that I actively explore new music rather than simply replaying the Call Me By Your Name soundtrack and Phantom Thread score 4-6 times per day while working, I would recommend Andy Shauf (The Party), Owen Pallett (Heartland) and Miya Folick (Premonitions)

This was hilarious.
Welcome and good luck  I hope you enjoy your Didion novel!

It's about that time I suppose! I was notified via email from the chair of graduate studies of my acceptance to U of Illinois- Urbana Champaign PhD program...."champaign" befits this evening's festivities for me! Good luck to everyone...it's getting real!

I got you, hold on a sec.

Wow, here we are in mid-late February! You're welcome everyone !!

Hi everyone! Long time lurker here! I posted the UIUC acceptance. Still in utter shock. I applied to many, many programs and I'm surprised that the first one I've heard back from is an acceptance.

I got you, hold on a sec.

Wow, here we are in mid-late February! You're welcome everyone !!

I got you, hold on a sec.

Wow, here we are in mid-late February! You're welcome everyone !!

I got you, hold on a sec.

Wow, here we are in mid-late February! You're welcome everyone !!

Hi all. After lurking for some time, I decided to make an account after finalizing some master's applications. You lot seem like a lovely, diverse array of talented people. I hope you all get into your first choices. I must admit I was hesitant to chime in because I find GC a bit difficult to navigate, but that could very well be my exhaustion talking. Trying to prepare grad school applications I was happy sending off while working two jobs was...iiinteresting. Since everyone seems to be introducing themselves, I'm an American applicant angling to do an IR master's in the UK. I believe my brain is currently approaching a shutdown rivaled only by that of my country's government. *laughs in sad* I am currently reading a Didion novel; she makes me feel cooler than I am.

@dilby Hahahaha! That killed me. Brought a good bit of laughter to this boring and slow moving afternoon. If only it were so!
In the meantime, just finished submitting some poetry to 3 magazines, and am now headed off to yoga. Anything to speed up the days...
Is anyone else finding that not knowing about grad school is making trying to plan future endeavors increasingly complicated? I was talking to my mom, and realized that if I stay in CA for grad school, I won't want to drive my car back (where my family lives) for the summer, but I also can't assume that I will stay in CA, and therefore cannot buy my plane ticket...

I got you, hold on a sec.

Wow, here we are in mid-late February! You're welcome everyone !!

I got you, hold on a sec.

Wow, here we are in mid-late February! You're welcome everyone !!

I got you, hold on a sec.

Wow, here we are in mid-late February! You're welcome everyone !!

I got you, hold on a sec.

Wow, here we are in mid-late February! You're welcome everyone !!

Idk about all of you but I’m getting pretty tired of the fact that I experience time passing at a normal rate! Wish I could just KNOW decisions already and move on with my life one way or another.

I doubt that adcomms are looking for reasons to disqualify someone's application! On the contrary, a lot of departments will email you if they notice that you're missing documents. I'd say that giving the department a call during business hours tomorrow is probably the best course of action. UCLA didn't show my GRE scores on the day I submitted my app, and the graduate coordinator I talked to was very reassuring. They want everyone's application to have a good shot!

I doubt that adcomms are looking for reasons to disqualify someone's application! On the contrary, a lot of departments will email you if they notice that you're missing documents. I'd say that giving the department a call during business hours tomorrow is probably the best course of action. UCLA didn't show my GRE scores on the day I submitted my app, and the graduate coordinator I talked to was very reassuring. They want everyone's application to have a good shot!

Yes! It's hard to escape the Winedale alumni community if you're at all involved in theatre in Austin. I was walking out of the grocery store a few weeks ago and someone came up to me and said "Hey, didn't you play Edgar last summer?"
I've done the same to a few people around town.  

Yeah, Pom Poko is a bizarre and fun film, and fairly radical in its environmental message. Isao Takahata was a really wonderful animator—losing him last year still hurts.  

You're exactly right  I feel lucky to have a very close relationship with Shakespeare because of a regionally famous English department program at UT (with its own cute little Wikipedia page!) where students perform plays in a barn-converted-into-an-Elizabethan-theater in the middle of rural Texas. The alumni community is huge because the program has been going for 49 years and the audiences are pretty huge and really enthusiastic. When they did Cymbeline a couple of springs ago, people literally screamed when Iachimo emerged from the chest in Imogen's room. And (lol) when the shepherd boy emerged from offstage holding Cloten's head. And (lol) when Zeus showed up.
Unrelated to Cymbeline, last spring Winedale did one of the best Midsummers I've ever seen, complete with Hippolyta suggestively delivering the line "I was with Hercules and Cadmus once" to a packed, inebriated audience who had NEVER heard it delivered that way before. It felt like the roof was going to come off of the barn.
 
I hope you both are hanging in there. It's always hard to make a change to the structures of comfort/affection/affirmation that are built into your life--that's clearly one of the reasons this process is so difficult for so many people.
For me, those moments of fear and/or loneliness and/or vulnerability are usually where Miyazaki's films come in to make me feel like, hey, at least this old dude in Japan thinks that the universe errs on the side of kindness to the afraid & downtrodden. I'm sure you have your own sources of comfort, and I hope they're working for you right now (and if you're looking for a new one, try this wonderful film).
......just stay the hell away from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for a little while. It'll be there for you later.  

I think because of how quickly one year in my current job has gone by, it's not so stressful for me to think about the possibility that I'll have to do it again. Being away from academia has certainly given me some confidence that research/teaching is what I want to do, but having a year where I don't owe my free time to anyone but myself has, for the most part, been really lovely.
When my mentors (professors) ask what I'm up to, they sort of envy being able to dive into anything I'm curious about (like, say, reading biographies or Shakespeare plays instead of books that are strictly or even tangentially connected to my research areas). And the time has just blazed by. If any of you find yourself in a similar situation, I think/hope you'll have a similar experience.
A year is no time, and you will keep getting smarter while you're away from school—even if you're not doing something you think is "special" like joining the peace corps or whatever (although that would of course be a wonderful way to spend your time). In fact, when I came back to my thesis to start working on this cycle's writing sample, I was amazed at how much the distance from my writing enabled me to think about my argument differently and reconstruct/strengthen it. If I get shut out this year, I'm almost excited about the possibility that another year of life will make me an even stronger applicant.
I also haven't been able to do any plays since college (where I did 1-2 per semester), so if I don't get in I think I will probably actually audition for some stuff around town this spring/summer rather than thinking I have to set aside all of my mental energy for applications. I know someone who is putting on Cymbeline in June and that one is a blast.  

@dilby I’m forever using Ghibli movies as pick-me-ups as well lol (especially Whisper of the Heart, From Up on Poppy Hill, and My Neighbor Totoro)

I think because of how quickly one year in my current job has gone by, it's not so stressful for me to think about the possibility that I'll have to do it again. Being away from academia has certainly given me some confidence that research/teaching is what I want to do, but having a year where I don't owe my free time to anyone but myself has, for the most part, been really lovely.
When my mentors (professors) ask what I'm up to, they sort of envy being able to dive into anything I'm curious about (like, say, reading biographies or Shakespeare plays instead of books that are strictly or even tangentially connected to my research areas). And the time has just blazed by. If any of you find yourself in a similar situation, I think/hope you'll have a similar experience.
A year is no time, and you will keep getting smarter while you're away from school—even if you're not doing something you think is "special" like joining the peace corps or whatever (although that would of course be a wonderful way to spend your time). In fact, when I came back to my thesis to start working on this cycle's writing sample, I was amazed at how much the distance from my writing enabled me to think about my argument differently and reconstruct/strengthen it. If I get shut out this year, I'm almost excited about the possibility that another year of life will make me an even stronger applicant.
I also haven't been able to do any plays since college (where I did 1-2 per semester), so if I don't get in I think I will probably actually audition for some stuff around town this spring/summer rather than thinking I have to set aside all of my mental energy for applications. I know someone who is putting on Cymbeline in June and that one is a blast.