On being lonely

Have you met my new best friend? Her name is Geraldine. I try to spend at least 4 hours with her every day. I think about her constantly and worry about her a lot. Sometimes being in her company is the most exciting thing on the planet and other times it's dull. I try to be a good friend. I give Geraldine a lot of attention, because I feel terrible about myself if I don't. Geraldine is going to help me find my dream job and get it. But since meeting Geraldine, my contact with my other friends has dwindled.

Okay, seriously... teaching online is great for getting research done, but I miss having interaction with my students. E-mails just don't cut it. No one laughs at my jokes, sits at the edge of the seat in anticipation of what I'll say or do next, or nods when I explain something well. There are no lightbulb moments when teaching online. I know that I'm not suppose to think of my students as my audience, but they are. I have been a stand up comedian since I started teaching 7 years ago, but this year my fan club is gone and I just have Geraldine staring at me everywhere I go.

One of my office mates graduated last term and now I don't get to see her often enough. My other office mate is missing in action and when he is around, he's sleeping on his desk or occupied burrying his head in his hand for who-knows-what-reason. My office is silent. Students don't come to visit me, everyone else is teaching when I'm around and Geraldine is the only one waiting for me.

Not taking classes anymore has been a big change too. My classmates liked me because I baked for every seminar and talked when no one else had anything to say. Now they are staving students with lots of uncomfortable silence. I don't get to talk to my friends before class or during breaks because there is no more class or break time.

I knew that it would be difficult to set a work schedule each day while writing a dissertation, but no one told me how lonely it is to write one. When I started graduate school, I fantasized about how great it would be to be a professor with an office of my own. I shared an office with 7 other people that year and between their phones ringing, pranks and lots of cursing, it was hard to get work done (thus I hid in the stairwell... both escaping the chaos and the retalliation for my latest prank). Now there is no one around to prank except for Geraldine, and I don't think that would work out in my favor. This week I've been finding myself yearning for company. It would be so nice to have someone else around to go with me to the library, sit in the office with me while I read, tell me a joke or interrupt my work with the discovery of a stupid website. Instead, I just spend time with Geraline.

But writing a dissertation isn't just lonely because my office is empty and I don't go to class anymore. It's lonely because being an academic is lonely. It's a life of people not understanding just what it is exactly I do for a living. It's a system that takes years to get into and to figure out. It's telling people that I'm in school and hearing them make jokes about me being a professional student. It's filled with moments of looking at pictures of friends' lives and wondering how on earth they could have kids that are 10 already or own a house. It's not being able to listen to the news anymore because everytime it mentions "studies show that..." I immediately wonder what the study was, who conducted it, how the research was collected and how old the data is. It's explaining to someone for the eleventybillionth time that I don't know when I will be done with school and no, I don't know where I will find a job when I'm done. And the people who should understand this loneliness the most because they're also an academic don't understand it either-- they either burry themselves in their books or at home catching up with everything else in life that needs to be done.

So even though I have a new best friend, I miss my old friends and wish they would stop by for more cookies more often.