Fud

I'm so excited. It's the academic equivalent of reading Wanderlust from the comfort of your Tube seat and losing yourself down a vast dusty track in the outback, laden with rucksack and telescope, alone and intent on searching for the darkest skies on Earth from which to view supernovae. Or stomping through teeming undergrowth, swatting mozzies off your sweaty countenance as you trek in search of some endangered beast or long lost tribe. When you look up and you're on an old rickety train somewhere between Charing Cross and Embankment instead, the hit is no less energising. More so, in fact.

I've spent the last few weeks helping students with their applications for Harvard, Yale, Georgia Tech, Oxford etc by rewriting and editing personal statements and fixing CVs. Oooh, I thought. Harrrrvard. Mmmm. Oxxxxford. Yes, I said to the aeronautical engineer who wants to do Phd research on aeroplane engines that run on some kind of dangerous sounding explosion - go do it. The deadline might be a week's time and you only decided to apply last week, but don't give up: apply again next year if you fail the GRE and don't blame it on my teaching seeing as you only gave me a month to teach you the whole course and you're Russian.

Then other thoughts occurred. If these not particularly genius folk (the others, I mean - the Russian is pretty sharp) are applying to these wonderous places, and some of them are downright dim, what it means is, these places are filled with ordinary people and some of them are not even scarily clever...

So I spent last night in ac-lust. Academic lust. Searching for the perfect Phd, or fud, as I like to call it. I sent an email to a nice prof in Stanford's department of literary philosophy to tell him I was interested in the course he's thinking of running if he has enough interest. I found out that a comparative literature Phd at Harvard requires four languages, minimum, so I'm definitely not taking that, but other courses look delectable. I contemplated the 'The Centre for the Study of Rationality' at the Hebrew University, even though "Every student in the program must have a background in mathematics at least at the level required for admission to the University's Department of Statistics: this includes differential and integral calculus, and linear algebra. The student must also have an introductory course in statistics and probability and a course in game theory", the very idea of which made me come out in a nasty rash, but I have a good friend who's a maths teacher, so it's not impossible. But studying decision making is rather bloody ironic, considering, and not sure if it interests me fully anyway as the maths makes it all a bit, well, mathematical.




I think I found my doctorate course, anyway. I think I found funding and I think, seeing as they are 'actively seeking researchers in these fields' and I deemed those fields exactly right for my purposes of getting in, I'd definitely be in the running. The only problems are - one, the application deadline is in 2 weeks and I'd have to outline a whole research project including relevant reading done thus far and intended sources, which is expecting alot from the 'miracles happen during Chanuka' belief, and two, it's not in Israel and I am.

I won't apply now, obviously, even though one part of me is going 'Phduckit. Why not? Just to see if I could get in...' Maybe I'll spend the coming year reading and figuring out my line of research and apply for next year. I do feel guilty that my children's education is what I should be investing time in now and not my own, so even if I do it in like ten years time, it would be ok, I guess. A long wait, but then at least my children won't be illiterate ignoramuses. It made me so excited to even consider it and now nothing seems impossible. I did rule out most of the Ivy League and US universities, merely because I can't easily schlepp the tribe somewhere else after recently upheaving them (maybe that's not the right word - it sounds like I puked them out). But maybe. One day. Five years of the Phd is paid for in the US, as long as you teach a bit. Oooh.





So rather than read about trips to Antarctica and Chile, I'm getting my kicks from reading graduate programs and checking out the courses available in the world's top universities, and my hairs are on end. This is fun, man! I'm even considering studying astronomy, or anthropology, just for a little something in the meantime, until the kids get bigger, until the day comes when I can go off and become the leading professor in the philosophy of stellar-linked rationality in the emotional ethics of Irish Jewish Thai literature based on the absence/presence of the author and the literary techniques of ancient Jewish texts. (Maybe I'd be the only professor in that particular field, in fact, thinking about it.)

The world is my oyster. (Is that why they call a London travel pass an Oyster card?)

The other significant thing going on this week is a likkle day called Harismas on 25th, which is nothing at all here in the Holy City but a regular Thursday (or whatever). It never ceases to amaze me that a day so built up all over the world, with such an drawn-out, panicky, excitable countdown; a day that people travel all over the world to arrive before; that they take time out to buy things for, spend so much money on and over-eat and over-booze to such a remarkable extent doesn't even get a mention. It simply doesn't exist, full stop. Unless you go to Bethlehem or Nazarus, and as a Jew, that's illegal. But I know it does exist, which makes it feel kinda furtively exciting. I look around the streets at the very normal goings-on, and know what's happening in all the homes of my family and friends and it's like a weird movie where all the action is building up in certain scenes but keeps getting cut with scenes from a boring, ordinary day where things are moving really slowly. The things I miss most on that day are tastes - rich, alcoholic, over-indulgent. But I don't miss smoking, so that's mucho excellente.




Anyway.

What I'm trying to say is Seasons Greetings to all of you, whatever your leanings. Happy HeyZus-mas day, and Chag Sameach. May miracles abound.