Writing a Dissertation

in four hours!!  aw yeah!!

I lost all of yesterday to being a good person.  I am not complaining; rather, just stating a fact.  I went into yesterday knowing that I was going to lose much of the day to helping out friends, just not quite all of it.

First, I helped a friend drop off his car to have his brakes fixed (just as my brakes needed fixing the week before – ah mountain construction, how I loath thee!!!).  Then, I helped one of my much beloved professors get a new computer and set it up (this was a very exciting thing!). Finally, I spent the evening watching over my friend’s sick daughter while she was at rehearsal.

I am glad that I was able to help make my friends’ lives easier yesterday, but that meant that I only wrote about three sentences yesterday.  I know, I know—I should not poo-poo three sentences as that is certainly more than I’ve cranked out some days, but I am getting greedy here.  I want pages!!  Lots of beautiful pages! 5 to 10 pages of the dissertation a day!!!!

Okay, 10 might be pushing it, but I do want at least 5 a day right now.  In order to achieve this, I think it is going to be all about me for a little while.  Yes, yes, you might ask, “Amelia, when is it not all about you?!?!!!” and you would not be too far off the mark with that statement/question as I do have certain luxuries—the lack of family, partner, pets, or anything that makes immediate demands on me and that is in my space.  (Who knew lacking those would be considered a good thing?)  But I came to the mountain in part for balance this summer—that ever elusive work/life balance.  So far things have been pretty good with the whole balancing act.  I have not gone overly crazy with the partying, for as I kissed someone good-bye Saturday night while leaving the dance, he commented that I keep leaving events early—yup, that’s a fact. But I am still not quite where I want to be with the dissertation.

Other stuff has come up which has required some of my attention.  Really, its all been lots of crap with no fewer than three lawyers involved and lots of me yelling, which I can’t get into yet because, well, I am dealing with lawyers who don’t want me talking about such things online. At some point all of that should calm down and I can stop calling everyone an idiot.  The lawyer crap won’t be settled for a while, but I should not have to attend to phone calls, emails, and faxes on a near daily basis or the urge to bash my head into a wall after dealing with them.  That response, of course, is really only for chapter problems… well, that and crying on the bathroom floor.

After one more good deed tonight, life gets to be all about me, all about the writing, and all about this chapter…. save for Fridays… job letter crap days.  Sigh.

So this is what my desk looks like today…

Which is a vast improvement from earlier in the week

nd just when one project is no where near finished another one must begin!

Fridays, as well all know, have been “job search” days for a while now for me.  Things heated up in that area last week as I shifted from just researching potential postdoctoral-fellowship opportunities to working on the job-letter.  Oh wow, what a disaster that happened to be!

The job-letter, so I am learning, is a tricky and slippery little document.  In someways the struggles with it feel a lot like those with the abstract and proposals for the fellowship competitions that went down in the spring, but the job-letter is in a whole other league of headache and pain.  Add to that pain some evil bug bites from Thursday night’s reading out at Gilmore and you can begin to glimpse the degree of my pain.

The first pass at the job letter did not go splendidly, but it was not a total loss.  I managed to slap together an intro paragraph, a paragraph about my teaching, a paragraph about my professional service, and a closing paragraph.  But that missing second paragraph—the all-essential paragraph about what my dissertation happens to be about and my research interests… um…. yeah…. well, let’s just say it did not come out well.  That second paragraph became a bunch of mini-paragraphs, sentences, and fragments strewn about the page in need of organization and a better sense of self.

The lack of a second paragraph was fine, however, as I could send the first pass at the disaster-letter off to my advisor and not think about it for a week and not even fret over it too terribly as jobs won’t be posted for two more months… or so I thought.

Yesterday’s Friday-Job-Day was a bit delayed as the car needed attention. The left rear brake was failing and the wheel bearings (inner and outer) were shot.   As I am living on a mountain for the summer and driving up and down said mountain each day, the brake and wheel needed fixing.  No excuses.

The car is now fixed and so I planned on devoting today to struggling with the job-letter template once again.  After working on that second paragraph in fits and spurts for a few hours this morning and finding myself extremely frustrated I decided to waste some time checking my RSS feed. Well, crap: one of the various blogs had a posting for a job; a job for which I am even semi-qualified.  An actual job posting moves this whole job-letter-drafting thing from the hypothetical to the real. In a way this is very good as I now have a target and a real posting off of which to work, but in another way this just brings the struggle of the second paragraph further into relief.

I have worked on fine tuning the other paragraphs of the letter for this particular job, but the second paragraph—the all-important paragraph about my project remains elusive and fragmentary. It makes me want to nap, or eat sweet-potato fries at the pub, drink a cider, and then go nap.  Those, however, don’t seem to be productive options…. I guess it is back to struggling with the paragraph.

in a state of great exhaustion

and sans spectacles

I somehow confused

Le Tigre with

Los Tigres

Both are bands

yet worlds apart

I am cross-posting this piece from another OSU grad student in the college of Arts and Sciences to draw attention to the current funding situation across campus.  Recall a few weeks ago when I asked about funding… well, at that point I was hearing various inklings of some sudden funding cuts in departments: grad students all of a sudden finding themselves without GTA positions for next year with no notice.

Yesterday my committee officially signed off on my prospectus, which means that I have the green light to start the writing! This is both exciting and frustrating. Exciting because I’m excited to work on the project, and frustrating because I’ve done such a good job finding things to keep myself busy while I waited to do the “real” writing that I don’t have any time this week to actually write! I have to get a lot of work done on my paying gigs.

The other thing that’s happened that throws a bit of a damper on my forward momentum is that I lost my job at the university. Arts and Sciences cut a lot of graduate student funding and I was affected negatively. This means that I also have to find a job, which is the other thing that’s taking up my time this week. I have some deadlines to meet for submitting application materials.

But I’m still feeling upbeat overall – I have a project supported by a great committee, and I have a direction! These are all good things.

My next step is to add about 10 pages to the prospectus document where I unpack some key terms and concepts (disability, monster/freak, spectacle, periodical) to give a good theoretical basis to the project. This will become the draft of my introduction. Then, according to my awesome advisor, I can start with whatever chapter excites me the most:)

It really makes me sad to learn that with only a month before her contract runs out, a fellow grad student has gotten her prospectus approved and is so excited to begin one of her chapters only to find herself no longer supported by her department.

Today was good.  Many things got accomplished writing wise, and I’ve set good goals for Wednesday and Thursday.  I wish I had more energy to work on the “article” tonight, but after a long meeting and taking care of some other business while I was in the office, I just did not have the fortitude to drag myself back to the library to resume work. It was enough of an effort  just to bike myself home to curl up on the couch.

Even if I don’t write more, I feel like I should do more of something tonight—run errands, grocery shop, do a load of laundry, fold the remaining laundry that is lingering on the drying rack, dust or vacuum or windex. Or, maybe, none of the above. For the last 48 hours I’ve been feeling like I am developing an ear infection.  I don’t quite see how this is possible as I am no longer a toddler and I do not swim on a regular basis. Yet, the ear pain seems to be ailing me and making me a bit more tired than usual.

The ear issue, however, is not and will not be an excuse for slacking on the writing/editing/rearranging. Right now it feels like the first 24 of the 58 pages are set in place.  Tomorrow and Thursday I hope to get the next section completely and properly rearranged.  That plan will leave me with Friday and Saturday to worry about the last section and write any new content that is needed for the final section. Sunday and Monday will be spent editing the whole thing, with or without the help of editing elves.

Okay, time to go find the energy to at least do the dishes from dinner.

These days I seem to be spending a lot of time moving between different word documents, different versions of drafts of the “article.” Each happens to be labeled at the top via the file name, but at a quick glance I can’t necessarily distinguish between the May 17th draft and the May 23rd draft.

I think it would be lovely in whatever the next release of MS Office will be, 2010? 2011?, if microsoft could see fit to allow me to somehow color-code the backgrounds of the various documents or the panes themselves.  Such color coding would allow me to quickly distinguish between documents as I move back and forth. However, perhaps by the time microsoft accedes to my wishes I will have the lovely set up of two mammoth, linked Apple cinema displays—then I will be able to see all my open documents at once!