New Year, Same Old Thing

I'm ready for a change. I don't know what it is, maybe something biological, but after doing the same-old same-old, I get all antsy in the pantsy and start yearning for something different. It's not that things are bad, just a sense of unease that I've been feeling as of late.

It's not that things aren't going well - I had a great winter holiday. Sayaka and I went skiing in Hokkaido for a few days, then spent the New Year first at the shrine by my house, then met friends and talked, drank, and danced. 2008 has started off really well for me: I got a solid score on my GREs, which is the first baby step towards grad school.

I'm back at work, though the first two weeks are short so I can sort of ease my way back into the mix.

I guess the biggest thing for me is trying for grad school. The hardest thing I think will be that the schools I'm looking at want you to have a paper published already. That's fine if you're a college student and can talk to your professor about doing something, but if you've already graduated, then it's a bit difficult to write a paper, especially the necessary access to other works and research so you can develop your hypothesis without trying to reinvent the wheel. Spending lots of time creating your own study and writing it, only to find out it's been done to death already, doesn't make it likely you'd get your paper published at all. Yay. I got a lot of work cut out for me.