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Dear Friend,
It snowed last night. There was sleet in the forecast, but this is wet and fluffy and has frosted all the trees quite nicely. It’s like a refresh, a new coat of paint making everything quiet and orderly again.
There’s magic in the way snow just smooths out all the imperfections.
The stove is not enjoying the wet wood we seem to be going through now. It struggles to get going in the morning and vomits a bit of smoke into the cabin until there’s enough warm air in the firebox to push against the draft coming down the chimney.
For some reason, when it’s colder outside, that cold air pushes down through the pipe harder than the warm air of the cabin trying to rise up through the stove, and so the stove draws from outside and pumps into the cabin, filling it with cold smoke.
Yesterday was meant to be a big day for Chloe and I. Our last day together for a couple of months, maybe. I feel a little bit like she doesn’t care, or is distracted. She stayed with friends the night before, and we ended up not getting together until afternoon.
I get that she is reasserting her autonomy and independence but it kind of sucks that she gets to go off and have fun right when I’m too focused with work to do the same. I’ve lost my adventure buddy and it sucks.
It also has started exhuming all of this emotional baggage from past relationships I didn’t even know I had. Somehow we have managed to hit a whole bunch of my triggers all at once. Even when I was struggling personally, our relationship felt sublime for a good stretch.
I just really felt like I wanted a day together with my partner, being present for one another. And now that won’t happen, and I’m flying off to Colorado.
Ok, enough on the struggle, what about the wondrous?
I managed to score an “informational interview” with Dr. Ellen Peters form University of Oregon, after hearing her speak on Maine Public Radio. She was very generous to give me a few minutes of her time, and honestly the best piece of advice she gave was that for people like her and I, life is a “random walk”.
She said my best bet with graduate school is to do the same – look for people who are doing work like what I want to do, and asking them if they know of anyone closer, and in the process refining both my own articulation of my objectives and the network of interesting people out there to collaborate on them.
On the other hand, she also told me that a traditional path to schooling is a much better bet than Minerva (full disclaimer, she said she doesn’t know much about Minerva and anything written here which upsets anyone can safely be attributed to my faulty interpretation of her advice).
I honestly don’t know if I have 5 years of schooling in me before I can get to research and actually making and doing things. Minerva looks like they encouraging novel application of their learning concepts from day 1, grad school or undergrad, and that really appeals to me. Redditors have called it college for people who are anti-college, and boy, that does sound right up my alley.
Well, I have to go ski down the driveway and learn how to program a Campbell data logger now. I’d love to dive more into Random Walks and how reassuring it is that Dr. Peters and my Sister have devised similarly mathy life philosophies. Maybe next time?
Love,
Brad