Daniel

8:55 AM

My alarm goes off and I roll over to turn it off. I’ve never been a morning person, and my lifestyle choices reflect that. I’ve had lots of jobs over the years that require me to be up early for a long commute or an early clock in time. But they were miserable and temporary, and now I get to wake up at 9. There are a great deal of drawbacks to being a full-time graduate student but having an easy schedule is not one of them.

9:35 AM

It’s Saturday so I’m in even less of a rush to get up and at ‘em than usual. If I were at my place I’d have brewed my coffee and watched a YouTube video on my phone while I did it. In the past when I had roommates, I would be fine without constant entertainment. But now that I live alone, I find myself filling most of the silences with Content. It’s a comforting thing to do—especially my hour of YouTube before bed—and when I don’t have it, I can feel the oppressive silence. I’m okay with alone time and in fact mostly love alone time but I do find that I need some forms of noise and human voices to keep me sane.

Since I’m at my girlfriend Julia’s this morning, we make espresso pods in the Nespresso. Espresso is cute but drip coffee just hits different. I’ll get some later.

Figure 1: Me Espresso

10:00 AM

We gear up to go get some breakfast. I’m normally a person who has peanut butter wheat toast every day and loves that predictability, but even the most unchanging people must have fun sometimes. The dog goes in her crate where she’ll be soothed by some YouTube muzak. Julia and I walk down the street past Pat’s and Geno’s (boo and boo!) to Comfort and Floyd, a little diner in the neighborhood. Usually I’m the most impatient person alive, but the weather is nice and not too hot, so I don’t mind standing outside for 30 minutes waiting for a table. This is my first time here, and the food is decent. Not as memorable as the big platter of chicken shawarma I had last night, but that happened outside the time bounds of this Day in Philadelphia, so you don’t get to hear about that. I have hot coffee even though I really should have gone for iced.

Figure 2 : Observing Social Norms

Figure 3 : Waiting Patiently for a Seat

12:00 PM

After we finish breakfast, we walk across the street to Wine and Spirits to explore. I watched Lost in Translation a few months ago for the first time and haven’t been able to stop thinking about Bill Murray’s Suntory whisky ads, so I purchase a bottle. Product placement from a 25-year-old movie worked on me. I’m tempted by but do not buy a bottle called Writer’s Tears.

Make of that what you will.

Figure 4 : Wine and Spirits

12:45 PM

We get back to Julia’s house and I need to lock in and be productive for a few hours. This blog post already is more exciting than 90% of my days on this planet, so it’s time to bring things back to earth.

The Fall semester has just started, and I’m teaching an online Political Science course to a few dozen undergrads at Temple University. Teaching online is nice because it means I don’t have formal time commitments on campus in the same way. I don’t need to commute in on Septa three days a week, and I can record lectures when it’s convenient for me so overall I’m grateful for the assignment. We don’t get to choose what we teach, so you can get a real stinker, but I have been pretty lucky with my courses. There are also major drawbacks, because being in a classroom and actually interacting with students is so fun and fulfilling. I love hearing their ideas, I love drawing out the quiet ones, and I love building a rapport with them. I truly loved being a student in college (at least in undergrad; graduate courses slightly less so) and I truly love being on the other end of that. Teaching kids about things that I think matters, and watching as they make connections to their own life is a joy. My own lecturing and teaching style is much more engaging and dynamic in front of a classroom. In an asynchronous online course, I am simply recording lectures straight to camera, and have little to no interaction with the students. It’s extraordinarily alienating, not just for me but I’d imagine also for the students since this cohort would have been in middle or high school during Covid online learning. It is also probably the dream of university administrators, education “reformers,” and venture capitalists since depersonalized online learning is commoditized learning. It’s a service exchange.

There is lots of grading and stuff to do for that even though the semester has just begun, but I need to balance my time with my dissertation work, which is the real reason I’m here. Graduate student labor is inherently compromised. Since I’m working on my own research and the clock is running out on funding from the school, my highest priority is always going to be to myself, not the students. (Many PhD programs like mine guarantee funding for a set number of years. You teach, and in exchange the school covers your tuition and pays you a tiny stipend). That means that a great deal of courses you take as a tuition-paying undergrad are taught by overworked, underpaid, and mentally iffy graduate students who by design cannot give you their all. Anyway…

2:00 PM

After making my way through stuff for teaching, I move on to some dissertation work. This Year in Philadelphia post involves a lot of looking at screens if you haven’t noticed already. Dissertations are big, scary, self-managed projects. Lots of people don’t make it through them and are known as ABD (All But Dissertation). There’s no shame in that, but I do not intend to be one of these people. I intend to get my doctorate; to have a PhD. I intend to be annoying and make people call me Doctor instead of Mister. It’s a big-time commitment, and there’s a huge opportunity cost to it. I’ve missed out on a lot of smaller things because I’ve been poor for four years, but I’ve missed out on bigger things too like buying nicer things, going on nice trips, or even buying a home—things that many of my peers have done in the past eight years since I’ve graduated college. They’ve made advances in their careers and their relationships, and I feel stuck in place, still wearing a backpack and going to class. A bit of Arrested Development. These are all sacrifices I knew I would be making, and I was happy to make them. Nonetheless four years is a lot of time to second-guess your decisions.

It might sound like I’m complaining, and I am, because I love complaining. And this is my post not yours.

I’m so lucky and grateful and privileged to be able to be doing my PhD. I have parents who support me emotionally and—in times of emergency—financially. I’ve made good investments with the money I saved, worked a big boy job before grad school, and lived frugally my whole life. I get to learn, and I get to teach and be around a university. These are all things I love. These are all things I chose to do. People who do manual labor, or who wait at restaurants, who do like actual work have lives that are way harder than mine. I sit at desk and typey typey.

5:00 PM

Productivity is waning, so normally if I were home, I would go for a walk around my neighborhood in West Philly. I love West Philly so much, especially in the summertime. The flowers, the landscaping, the old houses. I love it all. I’ve lived in Philly since 2017 and in West Philly since 2019. There are so many good parts of the city and so many places I would be happy living, but I think the place I most love to live is West Philly. I took so many walks around my neighborhood during the pandemic to keep my sanity, and I continue to walk often for the same reason. It would be so cool to one day own a big drafty haunted Victorian over here. The downside is of course the houses are old and creaky and rentals especially lack amenities. The upside is that there’s so much character and charm. Dear reader, do you have a favorite house or a favorite block in the city? I know I do.

Instead, since I’m in South Philly today, I take a walk around there with Julia and her dog Gretchen. We make our way back over to Wine and Spirits for the second time to pick up something to bring to my friend’s birthday party tonight. Then, we go back and I cook dinner.

Figure 5 : The Dog in Question

8:00 PM

We take the bus into Point Breeze for my friend Kate’s birthday. She’s got a nice roof and I’m very grateful to get invited since it’s a great night for roofs. I’ve been rewatching Normal People and it’s making me want to have the kind of vibrant easy-going social life that TV characters have. I’m also very grateful to be invited because I’m doing this blog today and this allows me to farm my personal experiences for content like an influencer. I let everyone there know they are being farmed. Let me reiterate again that just by chance this day happened to be more exciting than 90% of my days on this planet. You’re lucky this didn’t fall on a day where I don’t leave my house and end up getting a blister on my thumb from playing too much Xbox.

Figure 6 : Some Doors are Better Left Unopened

Alright, I’ll leave it there. Thank you for reading and enjoy the rest of your Year in Philadelphia.

Daniel is a big boy now. Don’t follow him on social media and don’t follow him home.