Mind blank

I've got a bad habit of rationalizing things, and passing them off as real reasons. It's intention drift, or at least a reasonable approximation of it. The truth of the matter is that I set out not knowing what the hell I'm doing, and still don't. My reasons for coming here in the first place were an odd, muddied mixture of vindication, vanity, and an intense desire to understand our universal affliction: why we age. It was a powerful elixir, and still is. I suppose it propelled me through my first two insane quarters here, where I learned the vast difference between an education at a middling southern public school and here, at one of the top graduate programs in the world. The transition was painful, but I believe I've learned more in the past six months than I did in the six years before that, and now that I am in high gear and keeping pace, I find the intensity exhilarating. Things click. My research is interesting, but it is brick-by-brick, a slow crawl towards incremental progress, a small bit of data in support of a supporting idea; but I am absorbing new mathematics and physics at an accelerating rate. After my work with the pipettes and the microscopes, I remain, late into the night, learning. I am staring into the chaos, and on the edge of something wonderful.