Strategizing Again

"A Wandering Map," meant to help me find themes in my life I'd like to continue

On Friday I learned that I was not awarded a Fulbright Fellowship. It was a big blow for many reasons, but most of all because I really felt that I deserved it. So it's back to the drawing-board, both in terms of school, and when am I going to graduate, but also mentally, to get over this defeat and find some way to feel motivated again.

I picked up a book I started (and mentioned) a few weeks ago:

Brooks, Katharine. You Majored in What?: Mapping Your Path from Chaos to Career. New York N.Y.: Viking, 2009.Brooks is an educational consultant peddling the results of much previous research hashed together in a forceful, simplistic way. But for all that, the book may be a useful exercise for any young intellectual who has lost her or his way.

Here's a brief description of myself, circa chapter 2:

Among the interesting elements of Jesse's map is the skill and hobby of cooking, which in the language chaos theory could be called a "strange attractor" of certain key skills and values: planning and budgeting, creativity, craftsmanship, and also leisure, friendship and family. Like other young people, Jesse is pulled in multiple directions -- a pendulum attractor. In his case, "leisure" is a rough category into which he puts many things he values very highly: reading, writing, and talking about art, culture and politics, as well as drinking, video games, sex and other vices. He knows that he can't live in a world where he indulges in these things all of the time, but he sort of wants to. What confuses the pendulum issue is that on other hand, reading, writing and teaching seem firm themes of his career going back into his childhood. So Jesse is very much the kind of person who does not distinguish "leisure" and "work" equally carefully all of the time. He's still on a search for a good moral foundation, which would allow him to truly feel good about himself and the ways he fills his days. Right now he's interested in a lot of things that fall under a category of "self improvement" : working out, yoga, eating healthy, and spending time on his most important work, his dissertation. Still, potential projects in creative writing, translation, etc. all sap at his focus and attention.