To appease my friend who always complains there is never anything new on this blog and perhaps to fulfill its original objective of chronicling my arduous path of being a graduate student, I am back to writing again, both on things mundane and not so mundane.
Earlier today, I had an interesting lunch with Bryan Hehir, a professor at the Kennedy School and a Roman Catholic priest. He reminded me of my old Jesuit mentor and friend back in Manila, his bald crown and gray eyebrows completing the sage-y look. The very first question I asked was if I can call him Father Hehir, instead of Professor, since his Roman collar always makes me exert extra effort to translate. To his credit, he just laughed and replied that different people call him different things around here.
As with most things financial these days, it did not take Fr. Hehir long to persuade me that he is buying lunch. After all, I am a graduate student, not to mention his teaching assistant. We talked about my project mostly, but what fascinated me most were his stories about church-state interactions in the Philippines and the United States during the Marcos dictatorship in the 1970s.
I also received rejection number five (I think) on the paper that I co-wrote with Adam. This will take some time getting used to.
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The theme this week (and maybe last week’s as well), it seems, is about falling – falling in many senses of the term. Falling in love, out of love, falling in life, out of life, falling in faith, and out of it, and so forth and so on. I just realized this only a a few days ago in a conversation with my roommate but it turns out that the one positive thing about my dissertation is that I am never bored with it. Never. I am stressed, sure or maybe a thousand other things about it, but boredom is not one of them. Does that sound crazy?
It is probably still not as crazy as some of the realizations I made the past few days. But one thing I did learn is that one should never stop struggling. One can start asking for help, for instance. The thing is, life is about falling, yes, but it’s about fighting to be caught too. And that, I think, is a harder lesson to learn.
