Grad school is awesome. Grad school is evil.

Life is best as a grad student when I get to take a mental health evening and fill it with seemingly endless streaming episodes of Gossip Girl. Because when the time comes for me to need a night of escapism to relax and take my mind off things, I want to indulge. My need to rejuvenate didn’t exactly come from grad school, but I’m sure the stress it induces must be accounted for as a variable. And the fact that, as an interpersonal communication student, whatever I’m going through is enhanced by the fact that the interpersonal issues that I toy with reemerge in my schoolwork… like a tumor that could infect the rest of the body. I even talk to friends from class about this: how we are given the shortcuts for analyzing relationships and communication. I say they’re shortcuts, because we don’t put forth effort to think about these things. Rather we think about them involuntarily! Let me operationalize “involuntary” for you: totally against our will! It’s forceful with the potential to cause us turmoil… or force us into a Gossip Girl dependency to take our mind off the real world until we fall asleep. That happens to all of us, right? Or was I the only one hitting snooze over and over this morning?