justifying my decision (to myself) (again)

there was a cookout today next to hill house, mostly singaporeans, but also free food, so it was a tough decision. my wallet won. a couple of first-year grad students were also there, so we stood baking under the sun (the temperature exploded into the 80s today), eating half-cooked hamburger and discussing why in heck we wanted to spend five years of our lives studying our own miserable quarks in the vast cosmos of scholarship (most probable answer: we're sad). victor is a history major, studying the spread of islam in china in the 19th and 20th centuries, and KS is in computer science, dealing with the mumblemumblesomethingartificialintelligencehebbianlearning- neuralsomething, and how to represent that algorithmically, and why deep blue is not blue, and whether robots will one day take over the world, so the conversation was desultory, its only real nexuses being traffic laws in manhattan (or lack thereof), why a*star sucks donkey balls, and episcopalianism.

it is comforting to know of people who made the same decision as i, and the more people i get to know the more comforting it is. it is funny what one will do to mitigate the sense of loneliness -- not physical loneliness, mind you, because i have met more people here in three weeks than i thought i would -- but the loneliness of being different, of being forced to belong on other people's terms. and the very fact of knowing that there are other people who left behind home, employment, familiarity to come here validates that decision in a way, and the more similar the person is to me, the greater the validation. this may seem ironic when you read this over -- is that not the very definition of belonging on someone else's terms? -- but the distinction is subtle -- the first instance being "me defined as grad student in the psychology department", and the second being "me defined as someone rejecting the well-travelled road of career, rat race etc.". the second, of course, being the critical decision (and thus, the point of commonality with victor and KS), and the first its logical, necessary but entirely incidental consequence.