On the whole I am a rather healthy person: I workout 5-6 days a week, bike or walk most places, make sure I start each day with a healthy and well balanced breakfast, etc. — you know, all that shit you are suppose to do.
Well this salad loving, egg white eating freak is not so perfect and has some dining weaknesses – namely dessert. Blame it on the sweet-tooth I inherited from my mother’s father or from my father himself, but the day does not seem to be complete without a bit of ice cream somewhere in there or a nosh of a cookie or even some healthy thing made to seem dessert-like (microwaved apple with cinnamon and a bit of cottage cheese).
I am also a person who gets in food ruts. By this I mean I will eat the same breakfast for two or three months straight, or lunch sandwich, or fruit, eventually tire of it and move on (either entirely or until seasonally it comes up again next year). My present dessert of choice is the coconut macaroon cookie. I think I have been suck on these for about three or four weeks now, and I am happily stuck on them. I have tried other past preferred desserts, but they aren’t what I am in the mood for currently.
Sadly, oh so very, very sadly, Whole Foods has been out of them since early last week. I have been cookie-less for days on end now and it is beginning to get to me. I made a special trip to Whole Foods yesterday expecting that the cookies would be in, because seriously, how does one not get these back in stock?? According to Whole Foods they may not be in until Thursday. This is going to mean there will be a few cranky days ahead as nothing seems to replace the coconut macaroon.
rading sucks. Literally. Taking a break from writing this morning to spend some time grading student papers sucked the energy, drive and focus right out of me. Once I lose writing energy it is hard for me to get it back – I hope that won’t always be the case.
For now I think I will go make lunch and relax. Maybe a nap would help restore me or at least trick my body into thinking that it is starting the day again and can thus write again.
an someone please tell me when it became spring?
After a long morning of writing, this afternoon I stepped outside to run an errand and was shocked by the temperate nature of the day. Seriously, when did it become spring? It must have been within the past few days. With all the time inside writing I just had not noticed or, rather, I just had not set foot outside. Well that is not quite accurate: I leave the house around 5:30am each morning to head to the gym, but as it is so early, the temperature still hovers around freezing.
Inspired by the weather I came home and opened some windows to let in the fresh air. I even picked up some fresh flowers on the way home to liven up the apartment and my writing desk. I contemplated washing the car today, but it is not quite warm enough to start hauling around buckets of soapy water yet, so instead I cleaned up my bike. Polished chrome, a well cleaned and well oiled chain, new oil in the hub – all the signs of spring.
Today was a good day of writing and cleaning. I hope tomorrow will be just as awesome.
I have an event coming up on Thursday with those of the professional, non-academic sort. Any suggestions as to where I should go to have my nails done???
t feels good to say it: I am writing!
Yes, this probably means that I have now jinxed myself in someway, but for this moment I don’t care because I am writing! The writing is not necessarily coming easily, but there are words on a page and I see a direction/path/hazy something in front of me. Friday I wrote 5 pages. Yesterday I took the day off from writing to read. Today I am back to writing and hope to complete something like another five pages.
As I learned during my exams, a 5 or so page a day pace is good for me. Yes, I can do more, and I certainly can do less, but 5 pages allows me not to feel completely and utterly spent/destroyed the next day, which means I can get up and do it again. Perhaps writing will become like running and I will be able to comfortably increase my miles/pages over time.
I am feeling much better about writing this week (yes, look, there too, I’ve jinxed myself again). I am learning to let go of certain things. I think I am beginning to learn how to do a “dirty draft” – the intro to chapter 1 isn’t done; the narrative thread is not yet chosen, fully established, or more than part written; and yet I have moved on to a content area. Again things in the content area aren’t perfect and I am trying to make peace with that and just keep moving forward. I don’t know if I am so much learning how to do a “dirty draft” so much as suspending my anal retentive side, but we shall see what comes of it.
ow do you feel about plagiarizing yourself?
Today I find myself working (!!!) through a bunch of the historical information about some aspect of my project. At some point I realized that there were bits and pieces of it already written in an article of mine that is out being reviewed right now. So I opened up the article and started copying and pasting.
It feels wrong.
Yes, I recognize that the information will get tweaked and the language will be altered in the revising process later on, but it still just feels icky. Am I crazy?
I feel like I am in some sort of a staring contest with Chapter 1. From across the room, the piles of books notes and the computer stare at me. I, curled up in my bed or on the couch in the other room, stare back. Chapter 1 and I remain locked, stock still, not moving.
Occasionally I flinch, look away, or just flat out hide. Under the covers I go as Chapter 1 defeats me from across the room.
Other times I step up. Nose to nose at the desk, Chapter1 and I face one another. I am determined. I stare Chapter 1 down prepared to make it my bitch. I give a good showing, I stare and stare and stare, yet it refuses to break. I retired exhausted, frustrated, and beaten. Some days, hiding under the covers just seems easier.
Today Chapter 1 and I have another staring match scheduled. After my usual long day of work on Thursday I ran errands and grocery shopped — prepared to tuck in for a long, long fight.
Sometime around last summer my subscription to The New Yorker came up for renewal. While I’ve been a loyal reader of the magazine for longer than I can recall, around last summer such reading had been long neglected. Issues piled up at my bedside taunting me as last winter and spring I had completely thrown myself into studying for my candidacy exams.
For months on end there was no non-exam reading in my life. Even now I can’t really recall when I last read a novel for fun or even when I last purchased a novel. This state of things is highly unusual for me. I am a reader. I love literature. When I was a student at Oxford I read a book a day, in addition to my course readings. I am so lucky that airlines weren’t charging per bag at that point as I would have been screwed when I came back to America – the weight overages were bad enough.
During exam time, and even before, recreational reading started to seem unproductive, and there is little room in my life for non-productive things. Maybe non-/un- productive aren’t the right words as all reading and life experiences can be productive if viewed through the right lens, but I think you get the picture. Life was suppose to be all about work, and so it was. Now that I’ve moved into the dissertation things are different.
At the end of the day I find myself wanting to curl up with anything but my work. Right now I just can’t tolerate taking work to bed with me as I have so often done in life, so last week I renewed my subscription to The New Yorker. And at a savings of 82% off the cover price for the next two years, that was a deal that would have been foolish to refuse.
ecause the project is feeling so amorphous right now, I am feeling highly unmotivated. The gray, gray days aren’t helping matters either.
I had a good talk with my advisor this afternoon – one of those talks that was about the project, but wasn’t, but still was. I still want to hide from chapter one, but I think I will let myself hide until Friday. Maybe I will even skip my Friday meeting to write. I know, meeting skipping is rather unprofessional, but it will be the first one I’ve missed thus far in the academic year, so I don’t feel too bad. We will see what I decide come Friday, but I just need to get past this ick and sadness surrounding the writing.
verything is not going as smoothly as I would like with chapter 1. I guess that is because I feel like I have not even left the starting gate. My head feels like it is somewhere bobbing around a giant fish tank – no longer knowing up from down.
Chapter 1 feels awkward right now because I am writing the introduction to chapter 1 and not the introduction to the project. So I am told, writing the Intro. comes last. I find myself getting hung up on things like “Do I need to define this term here, or will it already been defined in the introduction? Should I write that definition now or really see what definition emerges as I write?”
All of the sentences and paragraphs that I have written and continue to attempt to write are like trying to crack a really hard egg. I am trying, but the shell is fighting me. Hit it too hard and then it is all just a mess of shell, white, membrane and yolk. Hit it with just enough force and the egg will come out perfectly – shell perfectly divided, leaving one to separate yolk from white. Too light, and well, you will just keep whacking away at it over and over again until it becomes a mess of ick. Tomorrow I see my advisor and I hopefully some talking will get some stuff going in a productive direction.