Huh

Just ran into apartment manager-type person (who replaced our landlady) regarding the sink issue (the one I mentioned in April) as I was staggering back in with fresh laundry and groceries. She THINKS, after inspection, that she might be able to get someone here to fix it by next week, and that she can't find my phone number (it's the same number I've been using for the past few years) but I think the sink might finally get fixed. Which means one fewer item to quietly simmer in irritation in the back of my mind, which brings to the obvious-in-hindsight realization that all my stress this past year hasn't been --no that's inaccurate. It's more accurate to say that the majority of my stress is actually from things being out of my control. I mean the work load is intense, but if I take into account the hours I put into studying / working in lab / classes during the last year I had as an undergrad, my hours is only worse because it takes me 2hrs to commute each day and also I do martial arts 4hrs a week. I have experienced nothing this past year that's more harmful than anything I've survived before and I really do think a lot of stress is born out of frustration at being told all the things I can't do -- be given all the thousand and one wrong answers while told there's no one right answer. I'm told directly and indirectly that so much of what happens to me is out of my control -- and even that sentence -- "what happens to me" instead of "what I do next" is a reflex resulting from some kind of passive brain washing. It's a kind of learned helplessness.

Well screw that.

The economy is awful and there's no funding for basic research and I am female and Asian and not-straight and currently getting over a flu. I cannot change any of these things. Some of them, however, will pass on their own, and I am well-read, intelligent, and even more stubborn than I am smart. I am about to graduate from a top-tier program in one of the top countries for research and I will find a way to get what I want out of life, even if it's not via the most direct route.

There is, as "they" have said, no one right answer, after all.