A shoebox of one's own

I may have mentioned before the two things all STEM PGR students say that makes me want to do my weasel in a henhouse imitation: "Of course you have funding, everyone has funding!" and "so where's your office?" Apparently, watching partially cooked beetles have sex nets you cash and a desk of your own, while researching the effect of censorship on education doesn't, but eh. The first issue was fixed with the successful unloading of my BFA dissertation, (more commonly known as 'the reason I never left my room senior year') and the second issue got a patch-fix yesterday. True, there is a desk in my bedroom - in fact, I'm typing this while sitting there - but working in the same space you eat, sleep, read trashy novels and shoot head-crabs on the weekends quickly starts feeling a lot like wearing the same dirty pajamas for days on end. It's just not that nice.

The reason I'm in a good mood today

Somewhere in there I had the realization that I'm never going to get any respect - undergrads aren't as good as masters students, masters aren't as good as PhDers, PhDers aren't as good as professors or postdocs, and when you finally make it to the top of the pile the whole world gives you side-eye because they think that what you're doing is pointless and why didn't you become a scientist, you drain on society? But one of the privileges of Humanities research students is the monthly (yay!) study carrel - a desk, a lamp, a window, and a chair, with enough space to get in and out of the chair, and a door that (oh joy, oh rapture) locks. It's not an office, you have to get on the waitlist again every month and do a good bit of moving around, but it still counts as a space of one's own, a lockable space where quite a few of my books are now waiting for me, and where I actually get work done because there are literally no distractions. And the more keys on my keychain, the more I feel like a real adult.