it's coming to the end of the semester, which means my time as a teacher is ending. which is good news, except that it means my paycheck will stop coming.

i emailed my advisor last thursday to ask if he would be able to fund me for summer and next year (my last, god willing and the crick don't rise). he wrote back to say no, "all the money is committed." i don't know for sure what that means, but my guess is that he's funding other grad students with it.

this is a huge blow. last winter, when i asked if he could fund me this semester after my grant ran out, he said he couldn't because he was funding b and j. he had thought my grant ended in june, so hadn't figured on me needing money. which is why i had to teach.

at the time, i thought that meant i would get funding come summer, since j is graduating. apparently not.

i spent last thursday night feeling like it was all hopeless and this was my cue to just fucking drop out already and be done with it. with no funding for summer, how am i going to survive? it's too late to get a summer teaching gig, not that i really want one--teaching takes up SO MUCH TIME. and come fall, my health insurance will run out (we pay by the half year, which is up at the end of august). health insurance here costs $1000+ per 6 months, for just one person. and if i don't have funding from the university in the fall, i'll have to pay that myself. with what money, i don't know.

maybe karl and i should just get married, and i can be on his insurance. sheesh.

i have a meeting with my advisor today to talk about data, but i need to bring up two other things as well.

1. what is the plan for me finishing my degree? if i want to finish in december, i sure as hell need to be done with experiments REALLY DAMN SOON. i mean, it's taken me all academic year to do the experiment i'm doing now--how many more can i reasonably expect to get done? the problem is that my 2 experiments (including the one i'm finishing up now) do not a dissertation make. typically, in my field, a dissertation is considered to be about 3 published (or publishable) papers put together. my two experiments probably make up one publishable paper. so i don't have great confidence that my advisor/committee will let me get by with just having those as my dissertation.

2. funding. what the hell? where did that money go? why did he not consider that i needed to be funded? what the hell does he expect me to do? obviously, i can't say that, not if i do still want to graduate. but for crying out loud, no one in any real job gets treated like this, where suddenly you are told that there's no more money for your salary, but you are expected to keep working anyway, just for the fucking joy of it.

fucking graduate school.

someone once shared with me a piece of grad school wisdom, origin unknown: grad school is they take a subject you love and make you hate it. i suppose that's not really true for me, i still love language and the science behind the human capacity for it. i just hate doing it, reading it, writing about it. i just want out.