Winding down summer

Being a perpetual student means that even now, in my mid-twenties, summer is still a distinctly different time of year from fall-winter-spring. In grade school, particularly high school, it meant a dramatic shift from busy, regulated days to empty, unsupervised days, and for me that usually meant a great deal of time wasted because I lacked the motivation or creativity to fill it in a wholesome or memorable way. Not to say that I didn't enjoy that wasted time; contrary to what adults always tried to convince me of, I do still fondly remember long lazy mornings when I could eat ice cream for breakfast and watch Lord of the Rings one disc after the other, with no one to look on in judgment. What amazes me though is that I still have a remarkable capacity for wasting time, and now that I'm not in high school anymore, there's a lot more regret involved when I tally up the hours that mysteriously disappeared with nothing to show for them.

The distinction of summer at this point in my life, while I'm a student but in that special unregulated way of grad school where work expands to fill all your time if you're not careful, is the complete lack of obligation toward classes. At the start of each quarter, I imagine that this will be the term of no classes, this will be the term where I finally focus on research and make leaps and bounds of progress. Then I laugh to stave off the rising panic as my schedule slowly but inexorably fills with seminars, field trips, classes I can't miss so I guess I'll just audit them as though that will protect me somehow, and other random duties. Soon the quarter is wrapping up and I'm looking over my task list and trying to cross things off with justifications like "well I totally thought about that" and "I did the first step of that and that's basically the same as getting it done." So at the close of spring in particular, summer looms as this magical 3-month stretch with no obligations to anyone, and only research to think of.

This summer glowed with a particularly optimistic light in the months leading up to it, because I had managed to score an internship that consisted of working on a chapter of my thesis. It was the perfect situation - make progress on research with no other distractions or obligations, and be held accountable for it so that lack of said progress does not go unnoticed (lack of accountability is one of the biggest differences between grad school and all other stages of school, and has been the hardest thing for me to adapt to). And, for once, I'd say that the goals I set back in May were accomplished by the end of August (with the exception of one particularly lofty one that I've decided to justify as having been unreasonable to begin with). I feel good about this of course, but in the back of my mind it's also a little depressing: I finally got the distraction- and obligation-free term I've been dreaming of, and it really did result in a lot of progress in my research, but I will in all likelihood never again have the opportunity to spend three months single-mindedly focused on one project. That's just not how life usually works.

Drawn from old photos of mine. Mixed-berry pie and sweet old Arrow circa 2008.

There's no use dwelling on negative thoughts right now, though, because it's still technically summer and I've been having an extraordinarily pleasant and peaceful couple of weeks since the end of my internship. Sam is still a few days away from finishing his summer internship, which by some stroke of luck is in Austin, so I've spent all of September so far in a beautiful rented loft in a cute neighborhood in arguably the most interesting city in Texas. Which brings me back to this tendency of mine to waste time that I should be making the most of. I've been determined not to let that happen here, and I've really amazed myself with how well I've stuck to that goal. And I've found that, no surprise, time off feels much more like a vacation when you actually do things with it.

This little stint in Austin feels different from a typical vacation in one important way: I "live" here. We're in a fully furnished granny unit with a full kitchen, so we can cook for ourselves whenever we feel bloated and sluggish from all the food trucks and BBQ. We have a car and know our way around pretty well so it doesn't take much planning to get somewhere and try something new. And most of all, we're here for long enough that there's no pressure to be doing something all the time. I suppose it helps that I visited a few weekends over the summer while I was in Houston, but for various reasons those visits were dominated by both of us camped out on the couch trying to get work done. The majority of fun, Austin-y things we've done have been in the last couple weeks, and yet I've still had so much time to myself to catch up on reading, go for short hikes, and do art. I've spent more time with my sketchbook in these couple weeks than I had all year. And I've been going to yoga classes. That's something I would never have thought to do on a vacation, but it's been so great. This brings me to another unique aspect of this 'vacation', which is that one of my good high school friends lives here, someone I hardly ever get to see anymore and miss dearly. I owe the yoga class idea to her, and it's no question that seeing her has made this place feel even more like home.

Maybe these are normal things to do on vacation for some people, but the great majority of my travel in the past few years has been geology-related, so this lovely mix of exploring a new place and taking time for relaxing and hobby-ing has been a unique and very refreshing experience. Of course, I'm a grad student, so there's been some time spent working as well, but not enough to detract from the sense that this is my time off before the craziness of fall quarter comes rushing back in.

Art markers are the latest & most portable addition to my collection of supplies, so learning to use them has been the focus of my art this summer. This is drawn from a random photo I found on Google (here). I think it looks much better if you don't compare to the original though...

We start the trip back to California on Friday. It's a long drive, and always feels that much longer for the many hours spent on straight, empty highway crossing the bulk of Texas. But somehow this time it doesn't look as long, maybe because we're coming from Austin rather than Houston, so we're taking the northern route through Flagstaff, or because we're stopping in Reno and Sacramento for a couple days at the end. As soon as we get back, this period of relaxation will vaporize - we're moving into our new place, I'm getting ready for my research group's Big Annual Meeting (not the actual acronym, but I think BAM has a nice ring to it), and fall quarter starts less than a week after we roll in. As usual, my intentions of having no class-like obligations fell through pretty much immediately, and travel obligations are sneakily eroding away at my weekends, but I'm still riding the wave of this summer's good progress and I feel optimistic that it will be a productive quarter. Even better, I have a lot of writing to accomplish in the next few months, and what better time of year to spend holed up inside with hot caffeinated beverages?

It turns out, markers are hard. And I'm out of practice with drawing in general. Back to basics - I used to love these exercises in high school, drawing one facial feature at a time. Much less pressure than a whole face.