To the Shores of Nova Scotia

Freight Trains and Formidable Theses Ch 1: Graduate School I refused to focus on a part of the puzzle. I didn’t mean to refuse, I just didn’t know how to let go of a strong conviction that there was something about the general puzzle that needed to be problematized on a level I couldn’t have imagined at the time. In researching not to problematize something about train-riders on a realistically doable level but rather as an excuse to poke around with intrigue in a world whose boundaries were nowhere in sight. My passion was in exploration, and I went from one object to another amazed by each but never stopping to settle for any of them. I thought it was worth introducing my general feeling about freight trains in an application to graduate school. I only applied to one school, and I figured I would not get into academia with a proposal about the trains that I loved so much in my personal life and that plan B , whatever that might be, would most likely come into play. Nova Scotia sounded exotic enough. When I was accepted they heard my first musings and said that it could easily be a book some day. One professor after another in the department would say “it sounds like you have a book on your hands!” but alas, this was a master’s program and I should decide one thing I wanted to do my thesis about. I didn’t know what they meant by cutting it down. I understood their words but the thing I wanted to do was from the beginning something that was not made for graduate school, and by the time I was there it had become so strong that I felt utterly incapable of breaking it down into a doable thesis. They said I had a book on my hands and when I thought I had narrowed it down they said I had two dissertations on my hand, and when I finally starting moving as if in the scope of a thesis I had already been spun so hard in my personal life that the project made little sense to me. I kept showing up with pieces that were unreasonable in that context and scope no matter how hard I tried to take but a slice. They tried to give me suggestions but I did not find them very helpful. For the purpose of accomplishing a thesis I should have taken the first advice I got from Emma; just do the literature. Talk about the way trains and riding are presented in the literature. This would have grown my understanding beyond where it is now about the issue of romance and reality in the representation and the imagination with the trains and I could have lobbed even those temptations of fairly easily I think to do the brass tacks. I resisted this option because I didn’t want to give up my fantasy of train-hopping for my field-work, which was obviously a terrible reason to refuse this suggestion, choosing instead something like oblivion. But I’m glad now that I didn’t do it. My psychotic melt-down in my personal life combined with an impossible quest to sneak a dinosaur into something big enough for only a mouse resulted in me getting more from graduate school than would ever have considered possible and by such trials I would not wish upon anyone. Ch 2: Anthropology and Anarchism Some of the first lit. Gramsci, Foucault, how impossible it seemed to me, a grad student, to make sense of either of these within a few month’s time when scholars spend their lifetimes trying to do so. Ch 3: A Nice Powerpoint The third week we were assigned to bring a power point presentation to show the department our topic proposals. I got a little carried away as it was my first time using powerpoint. I had speech bubbles bouncing onto the screen and little arrows spinning around with sound effects. The first slide was an image of a boy holding up a train that was falling off of a cliff accompanied by the sound of applause. I even had an image of a train wreck that emerged through a special effect with the sound of an explosion. Yes, the power point was nice indeed, though naught but confused faces stared back at me. That’s when Mi ripped into me, mercilessly. Welcome to graduate school. Ch : The Question that Haunts Me The question kept coming back to me. What do I want to know about them?