On the train home this evening, there were two women having an impassioned discussion about how to best organize books. In particular, one was debating the best organizational scheme for her collection – should she mix her fiction and non-fiction? Which books did she want to have more accessible?

This is a big dilemma.

When I was young and fancy free, I used to take great care in organizing my bookshelf – a habit I have since not found sufficient time for. The last time I organized my bookshelves, I realized my shelf space was tragically insufficient for my book collection – a problem I solved by acquiring more books.

Irregardless, strategies for organizing books fascinates me. Most of us don’t use the Dewey Decimal system at home, leaving many questions on organizational schema.

Personally, I like to organize my books first by topic, then by author, but – just for fun – I like to put a little randomness in there so you never know what you might find next to each other.

Below is a network of my Facebook friends. Each node is a friend of mine and each link indicates mutual acquaintances (friends who are friends with each other). Node are sized by degree – so a bigger node is someone who I have more metal friends with.

The network is colored by modularity – showing some of the distinct communities within my network. I have labeled many of the larger communities below.

This shows a lot of interesting things. For one thing, at my first job out of college, I worked with a woman who had graduated from my college a year before me. She was a great connector and brought many groups of people together. The result is a segment of my network which is a mashup of people I went to college with and people from my first job. Not all of them know each other, but the connections are dense enough that this stands out as a community.

Another friend from my first job was once – totally coincidentally – roommates (in Boston) with someone I went to high school with (in California). The result is a weak link between my “young professional” network and my high school network.

Before high school, I went to school in the wonderful community of Canyon, CA. A few of us “Canyon critters” went on to the same high school as me – creating connections between the Canyon community and my high school network. Additionally, I had cousins who went to Canyon and others in my family are close friends with many in the Canyon community – linking Canyon to my California family.

My California family is connected to my Massachusetts family (my in-laws), which in turn connects to the rich network of my Somerville community. There are many connections between Somerville and colleagues from my last job at Tisch College, and there are connections between Tisch College people to Civic Studies people.

So, that’s a little tour of my Facebook network.

I’ve officially been a doctoral student for a month now and I’m starting to settle in.

I’ve met a bunch of new people and can even remember most of their names. I know what my class schedule is and no longer have to actively navigate trying to find the classrooms. I’m getting a sense of the culture, the expectations, and how to manage my time. I have organized my desk.

I am having so much fun.

People keep telling me to hold on to that feeling: that flush from the first year of grad school where everything is exciting, commitments are minimal, and I just feel so privileged that this is how I get to spend my time.

I imagine someday I’ll be the one advising first year students to hold on to that feeling, but for now I’m just savoring every moment.

I couldn’t sleep last night, so at 2am I got up and worked a bit on my homework. It was so much fun. Even when it’s hard its fun.

But the little things are remarkably disorienting. This week I had a different commute every day – different buses, different trains – all varying by where I needed to be and when. On more than one occasion, I got momentarily “lost” on commutes I’ve done many times. Where am I? Where am I going? The answer is not always clear.

It’s hard to compare the pace of school to the pace to work. From work, I’m used to long days, working all the time, and constantly having to put out fires. In school, I have long days and work all the time, but the overall stakes seem much lower (for the moment!). I haven’t had to deal with a single crisis. There’s something amazingly luxurious about that. I’m savoring that for sure.

But at work, I knew what I needed to do. I could put out fires because after 8 years I’d developed the skill I needed, the connections I needed, and the knowledge and experience to troubleshoot effectively. The pace was intense and the hours were long, but I could accomplish an amazing amount in a relatively short amount of time.

School is very different. I’m still developing the skills, knowledge, network, and experience – in fact, developing those is precisely why I’m here. The pace is slower, but it’s by necessity – each task takes significantly longer. I have to figure out what I am trying to do before I can figure out how to try to do it.

I have been particularly tired for the last month. Tired in a specific way that is different from usual. Interestingly, it’s the kind of tired I felt the whole time I was living in Japan. At first, I’d thought it was the jet lag, but after six months I was still just tired. I was tired then because I was constantly processing – mentally translating Japanese into words I could more familiarly understand, learning new cultural skills, and continually inundated by unfamiliar input.

So I guess that’s kind of what grad school has been like. There’s been a lot of new sensory input. I am learning a lot, but there is always more to process. It’s like I can feel my neural pathways forming.

It’s a slow, deliberate and incredibly exciting experience.

Hold on to that feeling.

After nearly 8 years of having a leisurely half-hour walking commute, I’m back to regularly commuting downtown. This ritual is reacquainting me with a being I’d very nearly forgotten: the cranky commuter.

I don’t mean to make too light of this state – I have certainly been a cranky commuter on more than one occasion. But there’s a certain disagreeableness one finds only amid the packed walks of a subway train.

It reminds me of all the self-important adults in The Little Prince. I commuted largely by public transit in high school, and it always amused me to watch the people in business suits frantically racing for the train. And this was in the Bay Area, so there really was another train coming soon. What could possibly be so important that it was worth that much stress?

I told myself I would never run to catch the train. No matter how important I thought my journey was, I could always wait for the next one.

Update: I have often run for the train.

And when I’m packed into sardine cars, thinking about all the things I need to do and all the places I’d rather be, it’s easy to get grumpy. And when someone gets annoyed that I accidentally bumped into them after someone accidentally bumped into me, it’s easy to get annoyed back.

But that’s where I try to catch myself. Life is hard enough, and far too short for such simple misery. All things considered, this isn’t that bad.

So when I see a cranky commuter on the train, my instinct may be to judge or get annoyed, but really – I mostly just feel bad for them. What hardships are going on in their life, I wonder, that makes this moment the last straw?

I’ve recently been finding it harder to blog than usual.

At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.

When I really stop to think about it, though, I realize that I’m always imaging the present as an aberration to the norm. As though there were some time in the past when every day the words just flowed naturally.

It’s one of those tricks I taught myself, I suppose. Just as I often tell myself – it’s always busy this time of year. Of course, the truth is – its always that time of year. It’s always busy and blogging is always hard.

The writing itself isn’t so problematic, and finding the time to write isn’t as challenging as it once was. But putting a coherent thought into words – figuring out what to write about. That’s the hardest part.

This challenge has come into focus in the last few weeks. In the past, I’d occasional decide against tacking a topic if I felt like I wasn’t well enough versed in the broader context of that topic. If I knew that my thought or idea was just a tiny strand leading to a rich field I knew nothing about – it seemed wiser to leave that area to the experts. Or, at least, to wait until I’d developed more expertise.

But in school, nearly everything is like. There are so many thoughts, all leading in different directions and all wonderfully enmeshed in their own intellectual architecture. There is just so much to learn.

The challenge to the student is to use your time well. To identify a narrow focus, to allow sufficient time to delve deeply into that thought.

But such focus quickly becomes tiresome for a blog.

Over the next five years, you will watch me narrow my research focus. I’ll articulate a dissertation topic and no doubt spend a great deal of time exploring it in this space.

But, as someone reminded me today, it is good to have hobbies. And that’s exactly what this space is. My writing here will frequently cross the bounds into my “work” of graduate school, but ultimately it is a space separate from that:

A public space for incomplete thoughts.