Some might think it's ridiculous to be five weeks into my PhD and still be unsure what it is I am going to study. On the other hand, some might think it ridiculous that they expect me to know what I'm going to study only five weeks into my program. It's like they think I should have made that decision by the time I got to this level.

More fool them.

I bring this up because a couple of weeks ago I went to a lecture by Nicholas Kristof (I went with the stake president's wife, because apparently that's the kind of exalted company I roll with now). For those of you not slavishly reading the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof is an Op-Ed columnist who writes on women in the developing world. His lecture reminded me of why I wanted to go into development work in the first place, which was good, but it also made me question what I'm doing here. I can steer all of my research towards development and all that, but I want to be a practitioner not a researcher. On Saturday somebody asked me how I was liking my program and I told them that I could take it or leave it. And that's the truth. I've been in class for five weeks and it still feels like not a thing has happened that would make me at all sad to get up and walk away from this, and in fact, that's still my preference. Don't get me wrong, I'm not miserable all of the time and for the most part I am succeeding (more about that in the next post), but I just don't care about any of it, and shouldn't I care about what I'm committing my life to for the next five years? The circumstances of my getting here are sufficiently miraculous that I'm not questioning that I needed to come here, but I wish I knew why. Or liked it better. Or cared more.

I would take any of those.

As my dad says, I would complain if I was hung with a new rope. :)