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2003-06-25 - 1:17 p.m.

Well, it's been long enough since my last update to receive the final GRE score in the mail, so I guess it's time to update y'all on me myself and my plans. I got a Ruby-tying 5.5 on the essays, which made for a celebratory air last night. Now all I need are some personal esssays.

Shudder.

I know what I want to study, or at least I have an idea of what I want to study where. The problem is that each program has its own ideas about what is worthwhile to study, so I sort of have to tailor my essay to the school and its professors. I think at NYU I'll study the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, and the legacy of colonialism in the Middle East. At Georgetown, I'll either study the politics of Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism at the Arab Studies program, or straight-up International Relations at the School of Foreign Service. I don't know what to study yet at Columbia. Of course, all of this impressiveness is totally dependant on my getting accepted, so there'll be no breaking out of champagne just yet.

I've also started writing professors at the Grad schools I want to apply to, feeling them out and figuring out where I want to go. One of the profs I wrote, a certain Timothy Mitchell at NYU, wrote me back, and told me my interests lie more in Near Eastern Studies than in Politics: apparently, history is academia-non-grata in the political science realm. It would be really wierd to study History for me, since that's what my twin brother is studying. On the other hand, I certainly can't live my life in opposition to my brother, especially since he has no wish to have history all to himself. There is enough subject matter to divide between us, I think.

The reason I haven't updated or even so much as called you all is that I've gone into a chrysalis of sorts: I've been spending the last 2 months re-envisioning my life and how I want to live it. It's a wield feeling. I feel as if I've shed an old skin, and this new one is less new, than what was underneath all along. I fit. Of course, there's also a part of me that thinks I'm just taking a break from acting, or that by giving up acting, I'm really just giving up. That's another example of the sin called pride: making yourself miserable just so you won't have to admit you were wrong. You see it in bad marriages, in bad careers, in bad faith. This is not to say that I think I was wrong about acting, or that acting is wrong. It's more that I really have lived a lot of my life in opposition to my brother. In grade school, Billy was academic, I was artistic. Left brain - right brain. It's how I defined myself, and how I rationalized never doing homework. Billy was athletic, I was sedentary, thus I rationalized sitting in front of the TV. In high school and college, the old dichotomy was still there, only now Billy did history, I did Literature and acting. I remember when we took our AP exams, I was upset that I got a 5 in US History but only a 4 in English. I took no lesson from that. At NC, Prof. MacDiarmid, my sponser, told me he could no longer work with me, since he taught Lit, and most of my classes that semester were in History. I got another Lit sponsor and never a look back. And when the Grand Vizier and High Priest of the History dept assured me time and again that I was a History major in Sheep's clothing, I simply laughed it off and got back to ignoring my reading for Lit and Psychoanalysis. All because I needed to identify myself as 'not my brother'. Perhaps the last 2 years have changed me: Billy's been in NYC, I've been down here. I've been creating this 'Patrick as Actor' in reality, and not just in my mind.

I don't think he'll do.

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