Meh.

I'm on three days now of almost no sleep. Ugh. I feel really crappy right now, but I need to stay up ---- I managed not to nap today, unlike yesterday, and I'm hoping I can just reset myself into sleep at night via sheer exhaustion. But man, I thought I didn't do much yesterday ---- I pretty much sat around today counting down the minutes until I could sleep today. I don't know how chronic insomniacs get anything done.

And my back hurts ---- part the tossing and turning, part hauling my computer in a satchel everywhere because I wasn't happy with any of the places i tried to work. I didn't even look at my chapter intro today (again), but I puttered a bit at the funky dissertation formatting, thinking that hey, I gotta get this done sometime anyway, and maybe another day away from the chapter intro will help me face it. Of course, I'll be really upset if I don't file in time for the summer degree just because I'm incapable of looking at the diss right now. But I'll keep chipping away at the mindless stuff and hopefully I'll manage to sneak some of the substantive work in there when I'm not looking. I still have to write the abstract that goes at the front, bleah. Oh, and what am I supposed to write in the acknowledgments? I don't know what I'm doing here ---- after all, I'm in a miserable mood and hate everyone and feel like I haven't gotten any help from anybody, regardless of the actual truth. Maybe I should have thought of this and written them up a long time ago when I was more enthusiastic? Or maybe other people don't have this problem --- I haven't seen any bile-filled, angry and non-thankful acknowledgments. I hated this part of the yearbook thing too --- where you got to write some sort of quote or comment as a graduating senior? --- yeah, I felt that I had to write something brilliant and witty and wonderful and then, I think, ended up not writing anything, at least for some of the things.

Anyway, I'm a total fuzz-brain today. Here's hoping that I will magically wake up rested and enthusiastic to get that intro and abstract and acknowledgment page all out of the way ... then I can print that brick of a dissertation and bring it in to the advisor! Or even the committee! BTW, I went looking at a past grad's diss for some formatting clues recently --- Dr. Hospitality, actually --- and accidentally ended up downloading the whole thing. (I thought proquest only let you see the first 14 pages? This let me see all of it for some reason.) Anyway, I noticed his diss was 368 pages long (no notes) and now I'm feeling all competitive and bummed that mine is shorter. I mean really, listen to yourself and your locker-room mentality there, Cog! And that's not even getting into the quality/quantity point or the ridiculousness of trying to get me to write anything more at this point of utter wipeout. Heh heh. And when I think of all the feminist critiques of these kinds of pissing contests, too...

Oh, and I got rejected for two teaching/tutoring gigs around here and am waiting to hear back from a couple more. After that I'll have to start looking at nonacademic type things. Fucking Schwartzenegger and the fucking budget stalemate! Whose brilliant idea was it to finance the way out of our last state budget crisis through borrowing and bonds, eh Gubernator? Yeah, you "put it to the voters," whoa, yeah, that's brilliant ---- may I remind you that Californians are overwhelmingly the ones who decided to borrow themselves some McMansions and are the main recipients of the whole mortgage meltdown? Way to ask the addicts to enforce fiscal austerity on themselves! Anyway, I've heard some of the departments just aren't filling sections that haven't been locked into the prior budget ---- as in they're closing the sections and booting the kids rather than fill the teaching slots with adjuncts they know they have around, because there's a very strong chance that they won't be given any windfall money in the budget to pay those adjuncts. If the budgets go through and trickle down to the department level fast enough they'll know what kinds of money they can play with and there might be a huge demand when they slot in all the dropped courses in spring, but that exacerbates the boom and bust, binge and purge, ups and downs of the course availability, which you'd think they'd notice was a bad thing. Whatever. I'm in a waiting mode --- if this one dept. is allowed to hire some adjuncts I should be at the top of the pile. Or they may just close the thing and wipe out the dept. Thrilling.

Ok yeah ---- I can see how finishing while unemployed and moving into an uncertain future where I don't have a temp job yet and I might not even get one could be exacerbating my final-lap anxieties. Don't know what to do about that though, really. And as soon as I get those worried about and under some sort of control I get to start up on the job market again. Fun fun! Sheeeeshyeah.