#berkeley grad

Ya girl did it, just three exams stand between me and my bachelor’s degree. I have been super inactive on here for the last year, but I want to start posting more again. I may begin to post a little bit of a back-log of study related content that I’ve collected up from the last few months.

Right now I’m wrapping up the law school application process and I’m taking my next big step, maybe more like a leap, forward. 

I feel like that mythical dance track by The Avalanches pretty much sums up the feel I think Olivia, Miraya, Claire I are trying to capture with this come-back. It’s that vocal rip from The Main Attraction, on repeat played over a perfect miscellany of sounds and sights–pieces from the past, previously unshared, made present each time I let the needle drop or press play.

And although, the two-year hiatus from writing here was ultimately lamentable enough to bring us back–I think our absence can also speak to the fullness (in all its forms) of the lives we’ve all been living lately.   

I put off writing this post a while. 1) Because I had two school-related deadlines I’d been rushing to beat and 2) because I feared anything I could say about the last year would seem slow and less glamorous than my cohort of girls uprooted by nature of my relentlessly rooted profession. And it still might, and I’m down to be that girl. But that hook rings true.

Since I left you, I found the world so new. Everyday.

Two years ago around the last time I posted, I closed the chapter on a friendship that was no longer serving us. This song initially came to mind as I mourned and then celebrated the messiness of that friendship behind me. But since I last wrote, I am generally seeing and doing things in new ways that feel healthier and kinder to myself every day. Or at least, I am more committed to finding the world this way.

For the first two years of this blog, I was doing a fair amount of job-hopping, so the uprootedness was real until I ultimately decided to start a grad program at UC Irvine. If you are unfamiliar with the timeline for embarking upon a PhD in the humanities…and if you are among the legions of friends and family members who routinely ask me “when I’m going to be done,” just know that yes, I’m still here. And yes, that’s normal (It totally is. It is. It is? Right?).

As my friends get promotions, make new job moves, get engaged, settle down, buy houses, or have children–my pace of play as a career student does sometimes feel a bit slow. 2016 however, was the first year I started to feel like I was moving along. I finished my coursework. Completed my masters. FINALLY actually read Marx’s Capital. Started teaching undergrads in gender and sexuality studies and Asian American studies. Co-organized a successful (and funded) speaker series. And I decided to pursue a project I am excited about: asking questions of race, gender, sexuality, and political economy of soul and r&b music artists that I love and the places they come from–LA and the Bay.

In the spring, I presented (and then quickly celebrated presenting) some works in progress at national conferences in Seattle and Miami. I closed out the year by contributing a piece on Asian American women’s sexuality in popular culture to a forthcoming anthology that’s going to be published in English and French–officially making me nerdy on an international scale. None of this would have been accomplished without  the support of my family-family and my school family with whom I can share all work related neuroses unencumbered, because in the immortal words of Troy Bolton and Gabriella Montez, “we’re all in this together.”  

At a staff meeting on Monday a professor said that for grad students, there is no such thing as “work-life balance.” Rather, it’s a matter of balancing different kinds of work: your work as an instructor, as a student reporting to faculty, and as a researcher accountable for keeping your own project on track for graduating. I feel like this sometimes and more than I want to. Though I’ve been (and intend to stay) pretty hell bent on life, perhaps to my detriment of feeling at home in academia. But I hate feeling guilty for doing twenty-something life things (in lieu of the work).

Between big deadlines, I visit my family, go to shows, eat and drink well (sometimes with Miraya!), hike (a lot), and explore more of L.A. (and I’m starting to like it). This past summer, I was even able to visit the Bay and make trips to Seattle and Portland for much needed reprieves from Southern California.

And like Miraya and Olivia–I too have someone I’ve been sharing many of these good times with–though I know him well enough to know he’d hate me blogging about him. I will say, however, that he embraces my efforts to de-car-ify my Southern Californian life, has a huge heart for social justice, and possesses one of the most top-knotch man buns I’ve ever seen. We can discuss him and other topics in more detail over coffee or cocktails.

I don’t think I need to reiterate the ways that 2016 was trying on so many scales. You already know. But it did come with some joys, some clarity, and personal wake up calls to leave it behind and see the world so new.

Looking forward,