uh-oh, a new round of questions

So I just finished another round of deadlines (papers, Watson proposal, outlines, math thesis bibliography), all of which I managed to meet at the verrrrrry last minute. In addition to the fears I'm beginning to have about managing my life once I start the internship on top of everything else, I found another couple causes of concern.

First, there was kind of a lot of half-assing going on with work this week. Nothing new, per se, but this week, it extended to something I really care about: the Watson proposal. Some of it was the last-minute epiphany that helped me frame my topic; let me narrate:
Wednesday morning, I talked with a couple profs about the proposal and particularly about my soul-crushing fear of what I was getting myself into. Like I wasn't this scared when my gas light went on and I was stuck in gridlock on the 101 downtown and late for my interview with Legal Aid, which was a tangibly bad situation. The saving grace may well have been Yamashita's Japan-centrism: I'm looking at Korea (a Japanese colony 1910-1945) as part of my "food of postcolonialism" project. And that was the first, most important domino: the itenerary was set as a result, and it doesn't require learning ten new languages or hiring translators, and it feels good. Not like familiar or comfortable, certainly a little scary, but not on the level of a nightmare, which is what it had been before.
Wednesday night, I was talking with a friend about how I saw dim sum, the role it plays in my life and in how I see my own identity. And the personal statement clicked. Why do I care at all about postcolonialism? Well, it seems to me like there are a lot of commonalities between identity development in multiracial people and culturally contested practices like eating lunch.
Then I had to do last-minute classwork until Thursday night, when I ended up working as late as I have in recent memory on the proposal, only to wake up early this morning to keep writing. And I still ended up with a first draft that barely barely made it in under the whistle. Since writing the proposal and explaining the idea (looking at the effects of colonialism on the construction of food culture) to people, I've completely fallen in love with it. But my love is tempered with doubt: it was, after all, a first draft, rambling like anything I try to write about myself and without a doubt disorganized. The thing that hurts so much about it is that I can't imagine that love shining through the mangled and prolix paragraphs, the car wreck of a document that represents the entire basis of the judges' decision about whether it merits a follow-up interview. I know, I know, I could ace the damn interview. The project is me, I am embodied in this work. And I get to eat, too.
The Big Question this raises, though: have I really internalized this sort of last-minute, half-ass, get-a-decent-grade-because-I-know-what-I'm-doing mentality, or was this just a busy week? Can I make excuses about not sacrificing enough for what I care about? Why am I comfortable with doing work that I know isn't my best?

Second, talking with Yamashita this afternoon about my thesis raised another question. I told him a little about the dim sum experience (the most dramatic example, I suppose, of what I'm trying to say), and he asked why I didn't do a food thesis. Something language-accessible, like "Anglo American perceptions of Asian food, 1880 - 1980" would play to things I know how to do (deconstruct texts and reassemble constructive ideas) instead of stuff I'm lost about (legal records, vague concepts like 'Americanization', any sort of understanding of immigrants and their mindset). But it means, for one thing, a big backtrack: starting at square one, just like where I was five weeks ago when I got struck by the idea of legal access and built a semester out of it, dreamed up a career out of it. It makes me feel indecisive, mercurial to rearrange what was supposed to be the academic justification of what I was doing in life. That's not the worst part, though. Part of my doubt comes from knowing that part of why I liked the thesis idea was because it attempts to validate immigrant experiences, to fight oppression with my pedagogical sword and whatever. And the topic is personal, too--I saw my grandfather in the history I've been reading, separated from his wife and infant son by blatantly discriminatory legal barriers and then by a war. Dropping the topic because it's difficult (maybe even infeasibly difficult--no faculty member I've talked to has any interest whatsoever in advising me on the damn thing) feels like I'm 'selling out', giving up on learning my culture or family story. That changing away from this topic mitigates the good I thought I was doing. But I can't deny that the thesis would be better, qualitatively, would engage me more, and yes would be easier to research and write. I have a lot of thought time to go before I can reconcile this (I mean, here I go making an Asian history concentration thesis about white people) and come to terms with what really feels like the right thing to do. This is one that I really wish I could talk with Stephanie about, but she's as busy as I guess we all are this year.

Finally, something has intervened to push me to resolve the friends-of-low-quality problem. I can't do it, I can't deal with them, and I don't give a shit anymore how many times they tell me it'll all be OK if I just drop by and visit more often. Maybe part of it was alcohol as a depressant, but there's no way I can visit that space with my ex all over some guy like that. And I know I'm supposed to be bitter in the way that I "rise above" it and riposte him and her judgment/taste and smile knowingly to myself that I'm somehow the best she'll ever do (whether I believe it or not), but that's not how it's working out. That said, I'm ready to give up on everyone else in that group of people--the amount of accomodation I've gotten from any of them is less than zero, and casual company obviously isn't what I need now. I had at least three genuinely great conversations this week that really got to me; there's a level of validation and understanding that was there for them but isn't there when I'm with most of my old friends. Hard as it is to basically fall off the surface of the earth, socially, and worse to not feel missed (the consolation I always sought as a petulant child, the leverage I wished I could exert), this week has made me realize: it's necessary, but the things that have made it necessary aren't things I can look back on and fix. It is what it is.