Jan 22: scattered thoughts

I've been meaning to write about certain things, but have been struggling with my attention span, energy, and time over the past few weeks. I have a much longer post about mental health I want to write at some point, but other than that, here are some thoughts floating around in my head:

• It's a sort of ongoing joke(?) in our School of Information that "information" is so broadly defined, and no one really knows what a "Ph.D. in Information" really means. The faculty and topics researched here are so broad, and it's kind of incredible that this school could function the way it does. I personally have some ideas of what I think "information" studies should be (more broadly speaking, what iSchools should be), but I realize that my conceptualization of an iSchool is pretty different from what it actually is and the sort of reputation it's grown to have over the years. Nonetheless, in my mind I have this somewhat romantic idea of an iSchool, especially since this is where I feel like my academic interests most align with. Maybe I'll write on this some other time.
• I'm struggling so badly with my time management still, and there are some key tasks that I'm falling even more behind on... I still need to work on giving myself more grace, but I just don't feel like I deserve it for how extremely late I am on certain things. Still got a lot to work out there, and in the self-compassion area (which my new therapist and I have been working on...).
• I can't believe I spent the last ~2 days reading all of the Solo Leveling manhwa. I can't say I particularly like it, even though I'm reading through all of it. (Often I read or watch things just because they're popular, and I want to be conversant in them, and that's somewhat the case for Solo Leveling. Just to know what story people are really into. The same with Chainsaw Man. I don't really like either of these series, though I generally know what happens in them.)
• I don't have a lot of faith for this coming year, and I feel like I'm constantly losing hope as each day passes...