in which I start out discouraged and move back to normal

I've had several demoralizing things happen in a row.  I just don't know if I'm cut out for this grad school stuff.  I've been hanging out with literary types today due to volunteering at a literary conference that's going on in UTown.  I'm completely intimidated and discouraged.  I feel like the country bumpkin trying to hang out with the sophisticated people.  I don't know the right words, I don't know how to make their kind of jokes, I can't imagine this is going to end well.

But they let me in, and I'm not quitting, so I suppose there's nothing to do but just keep going.  It's funny, I hit this point every semester, and every semester I end up doing fine.  But it doesn't change the feeling-- I just don't have the gloss of intellectualism that you need to have to survive in academia.  That's why even though I've started practically handing out my blog address on the street corner, I haven't given it to anyone connected with my master's program.  Because the stuff I go on and on about here is so not the kind of stuff that would cut it in the academic world.  So they don't need to know.

So fuck it.  (excuse my language.)

I started this post sitting at one of the public computers in the lobby of the hotel where the conference is being held.  I wasn't exactly crying, but I was sort of leaking if you know what I mean.  My turn at the registration table was over, so I left and went and got a chocolate milkshake and a cheeseburger (strictly verboten on my low-fat diet, but ohmylord did I need comfort food).  Then I checked into the hotel where I'm staying so I can be back at the registration table at 8 a.m. tomorrow and took a half hour nap.  Between the comfort food and the rest and a couple of e-mails from people who had no idea what was going on but who were supportive of me anyway, I'm feeling better again.

The thing I regret is that there are a few people in the program whom I really like and admire, and I want them to admire me back.  And maybe they will, but just in a different way than you admire academic people.  And now that I'm pulling myself out of my funk, I think they do like me.  None of them can believe I'm doing this "at my age" and with the commute I have to do.  It takes guts of some sort, if not the academic kind.

There have been a couple of posts in the Bettyverse recently about self-confidence.  They've got me thinking.  You may have noticed that I don't have very much.  I'm working on that, but my goal isn't to be the kind of self-confident that is utterly sure of how great I am and of my own opinions.  I know a few people like that, and although they make admirable heroes, they aren't people I feel close to.  I just want to figure out how to value my own kind of self-ness, my own unique brand of being.  I have a long history of aspiring to believe or act in ways that don't suit me.  I'm working on that, too.

good grief, I'm practically sobbing into my coffee cup here.  (which, if I meant it other than metaphorically, would be decaffeinated, of course).

On a sort-of sideways related note:  although I've never been a huge fan of apple products (besides my iPod, to which I am utterly devoted), I am sad that Steve Jobs is gone from the world.  In reading about him today, I ran across the commencement address he gave at Stanford in 2005.  There is both a text and a video version here.  It's long, but it's worth it.  Or if you want a shortened version of it, the highlights are here.