I need to get this done

Ok, it’s noon, I’ve been working (with some relocations/bathroom breaks) since a bit before 9, and I have re-read all of my chapter 4 plus made some revisions to the hole in the middle of it. You know, it looks pretty good! It is very close to done. I had much less to do on it than I thought, but I had been working so steadily at it and was feeling so beaten down and demoralized that I was too close, like putting the page up right against your nose til you can’t focus on the words properly. I had thought it sucked and that I had so much piles left to do on it that I would never be able to finish it, so I moved on to the other chapter. Actually it was almost done --- much closer than my chapter 5 is put together --- but I had been too tired out by it to see that.

It was cold and refreshing here in the library earlier, although that plus lots of coffee was still not keeping all this tiredness at bay, and now it is hot and stuffy, in a foggy-outside- the-air-pressure-may-be-changing-with-a-storm kind of way, and that will make staying awake even tougher. Still, I want to go through and make all my rephrasing/editing changes on the chapter now, I want to type in what I did to the hole, and I want to clean up the ending including making the conclusion have a rousing ending sentence. I need to get at least that much done today.

I would love to turn this in today --- I feel like it’s that close --- but there is a huge mess in the footnotes and I haven’t started on them yet, plus lots of biblio material I need to add still. And I need to write captions and print the pictures, or put them into the computer file, or whatever I decide.

Therefore, I vow to fix all the in-text problems today, at school, and get as much of the biblio done here as possible, and then finish all the book-checking-stuff at home tonight, and I swear, as Scarlet O’Hara is my witness, that I shall leave the printed and finished chapter in my committee’s inboxes tomorrow, bright and early in the morning tomorrow!

For tomorrow is another day.

(Hey man, if I can't wear fancy dresses made out of curtains while dissertating, I don't want to play! Everyone should embrace their inner diva at least once during the dissertating process.)

Random Bullets of Driving People Crazy

• You know how when you were little and your brother told you not to touch him and you stood over him with one finger out, going, "I'm not touching you! I'm not touching you!"? It still works.
• I got a speeding ticket, I think too close to the last one for me to do traffic school and wipe that one out. Speed traps suck. As do long and boring stretches of freeway through farmland. As do cruise control buttons that turn themselves off at random times, which cause you to rely on your own lead foot instead. Gah.
• My neice is also driving, or actually learning to drive, and she got to drive the car over to my parents' tonight. So when they arrived my nephew came over and immediately told me about her driving and started giving her a hard time. She was just standing there taking the teasing (we're a pretty rough teasing family) and I was teasing her and I thought all was normal, and my brother (their dad) came in and immediately ripped nephew a new one, saying any rude comments like this were way outta line. I swear that my neice did not look upset until he started saying she was upset, and then off went the waterworks. But it felt to me like how when they were just learning to walk, and if they fell down and thought someone was watching them, they would scream as if in pain, looking for some attention, but if they didn't know you were keeping an eye on them they'd just get up and keep running. So I called my brother out on it, pointing out all the teasing I got about driving for at least the first 10 years I was doing it, and all the shit we gave the other neiece, and how nephew was just doing exactly what the entire family did all the time and he shouldn't really get singled out for it. I don't know if that was a good thing to do, or if it would change anything, but this seems to be my latest bit of troublemaking: loudly pointing out where they only think they are being consistent or fair.
• Refsuing to get in the car when my dad is going to be driving would be another troublemaking moment. He needs to have his liscence taken away; he has gotten too absent-minded to be safe any more. We have a big family culture of "respect the elders and never contradict them in any way" so pointing out any of their frailties in a public way or "making a scene" by continuing to hold to a stand after being told to drop it really goes against the grain --- everyone gets silent and starts looking away and at the ground or something.
• Of course, staying on the driving thing, this is coming years too late --- I shouldn't have ever gotten in the car with my dad for most of my childhood and teenage years, before the AA, but a) I was too young to really even figure out what was going on much less b) make that type of stand while still living in their house.
• When my sister and I went to the mall today, I picked her up at her place and she took her house key, but not the apartment gate complex key. As she explained, she never gets picked up by someone else, so she didn't think of getting the car gate opener and has no clue even where the pedestrian gate key is in her place. So when I brought her back I idled outside the gate until someone else pulled in and used their clicker thing. That's some great security. On the other hand, the last time I went to the mall with her we lost my car and had to wait until the lot started to clear out after hours to realize we were in the wrong lot. So this was an improvement. And of course I gave her a hard time about this ---- she's been teasing me about losing the car at the mall for years now.
• Oh and breaking the car-and-annoyance theme of this post, this is so cute: I went out to dinner with mom and dad last night and my mom was saying she had pictures of me in her purse --- and she pulls out three or four of my graduation pictures, of me being hooded and shaking hands with the chancellor. She's been showing them off to all her friends and everyone who says anything even remotely relevant ever since graduation, just like someone with new baby pics (not to infantilize me too much over here). Anyway, that just made my day. I think everyone should show off pics of me graduating, there should be dancing in the streets, a parade with showers of rose petals, you name it, I'm all over this. The more we celebrate this and see it as a big deal, the better. I wouldn't even be averse to a national holiday, just to float an idea or two, although really we wouldn't have to go all-out with the roses thing every year.
• Oh yeah and it appears that everyone in my family goes to bed at 10 pm, even in the summer and even on a Sat. Sigh. It's pretty quiet over here.

And On the Seventh Day Cog Rested

In the beginning of the day Cog created an idea.

And the idea was without form, and void, and full of darkness, and was highly unclear.

And Cog said: let there be a paragraph, and after much travail, a paragraph was there.

And Cog saw the paragraph, and said it was good. Except for a little spot that was unorganized, so Cog divided the idea into two paragraphs, the first separate from the second. And it was good.

And the evening and the morning were wasted on Facebook on the first day.

And on the second day Cog said, Let there be a lit review, and some quotes, and a nice little transition over here that connects up to the other ideas. And it was good. And Cog began to fear that all of these undertakings would impinge on valuable napping time. But it was good.

And Cog said, let the notebooks bring forth abundantly words of every kind, the winged words and the creeping, the words of the air and words of the sea, the words that walk on two legs and the words that walk on four legs and the words that slither upon their bellies on the ground (we'll deal with the words with cloven hoofs in a moment).

And words great and small appeared and were fruitful and multiplied all over the footnotes. And Cog saw that it was good.

And so passed the evening and morning of the second day, give or take a couple weeks.

And lo! One such day Cog returned to look upon the words, having been about some Other Business, and she witnessed much wickedness and all manner of riotousness and confusion of every kind amongst the words, and this grieved her in her heart.

And the Cog said, I will destroy these my words which I have created, the great ones and the small, the creeping words and the words that fly in the air. I will wipe them from the face of my notebook and the cache of my googledocs, for it repenteth me that I have made them, and I am in quite the smitey mood today, do not push it.

And lo! There was much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

But the Cog said, be not afraid, for I shall create newer and better words, and where the words roamed in the tenfold, I shall make them roam by the hundredfold. And I shall make a covenant to always back up these words and to never again wipe all the words from the face of the earth, and thus henceforth you will all be saved.

And there was great rejoicing, and the Cog set forth in search of a snack.

And lo! it was good.


(His riff is better. If you can't see it all there, try here, without any illustrations.)

W00t! Another paragraph down!

I have just finished tweaking the end of the paragraph I wrote the other day, and then assembled up a whole 'nuther paragraph that goes right after it. It was a mess, too, so it was no simple job. Happy happy! Now if I can only revise two more paragraphs today I will be a happy cog. Part I of this chapter is rapidly approaching a written draft status. Part III, if I may say so myself, looks pretty damn good. (I may have a couple footnotes to fix still, but, eh.) Part II, however, is pretty much nonexistent, which worries me.

But not today! Today I am only thinking about Part I and my incredible progress on it and how soon I will have conquered it and beaten it into submission! Huzzah! Hooray for mental compartmentalization and denial! And I had to have a double mocha extra strong this morning to survive which explains my overreliance on exclamation points! Whee!

Speaking of caffeination, last night was awful, by the way ---- you know what? When your neighbors have been served with eviction notices, there's not much you can do when they start acting shitty: ooh, what are you gonna do, evict me? Already happened hahahahaha! So, I had to listen to the sound of a vacuum cleaner and a very very loud Sublime album blaring away between midnight and 4 am. I'm not kidding. I heard at least one other neighbor get in a brawl with them and I went over too, and later I pounded on the wall, and later later I called the police, but they turned the music off before they got there so the police probably think I'm a nut. My only hope is that all that banging and vacuuming is because their 30 days notice is up and they are getting ready to get out right away. Argh.

After some more incredible and amazing progress on the chapter, I'm back to writing up more adjunct applications, and some apps for some non-academic work stuff too. Sigh. I have four things but if I get through two this afternoon and two tomorrow afternoon I will feel better. Bleah. Ok then, I've gotta get back to work and turn this mutha out. Leave me lots of comments, ok? And you should all post silly fashion things/comments/responses on the post below ---- advice? fave fall outfits? shopping wish lists? Go on, give me something fun to look forward to after all this crazy writing.

And Now For Something Completely Different!

Today I will be in grading, rather than dissertation, jail.

Note how I managed to be in my chair and writing by 9 for all the dissertating days, whereas today I have been snuggled under a blanket with a cat until almost 11.

Off for some misery now. And coffee.

UPDATE: Well obviously I am in celebrity grading jail because after a mere half hour of trucking away at those essays I left the coffee shop and went shopping. Like LiLo or Paris Hilton being repeatedly arrested and then almost immediately released or given special treatment or moved to a special "treatment ward" because they felt upset and threatened by being placed in the regular holding rooms. Unfortunately, I don't have their celebrity bankrolls (more luckily, I don't have their celebrity cocaine habits either), so the fact that I went and spent money is Very Bad. And I ate out later and felt quite ill from stuffing myself so I had to go home and lie down for a while --- this coming directly after trying on lots of clothing and discovering that I, ahem, am at the very top of my usual weight fluctuations and possibly have gone up a size, but, this cog, she does not learn from her experiences very well. Still, I bought things. Yeee!

I looked at lots of trendy clothes places and peeked in the window of crazy-jewelry-store-that -doesn't-even-have-prices-listed-and-I-wasn't-wearing-enough-rocks-to-even-darken-the -doorway-but-that's-ok-as-I-don't-actually-like-jewelry, and drooled over and molested all the yuppie trendy furniture at places like Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma (yeesh, I gotta get out of this place! It is insidiously affecting me ---- I am being ever more hailed by their professional-managerial-class siren songs and I want an antiqued, distressed wine hutch in an apartment with cathedral ceilings. Don't tell anyone!). And I sniffed all the soaps at a place even more fancy than Lush but I'm not so into scented soaps at the moment. And I bought a few things at Ann Taylor. Cough. Um, don't tell. 'Cause I'm unemployed as of now (and so don't need teaching clothes at the moment, even) and who knows where the money for that is coming from and I realize that this was a Very Unwise Thing To Do.

I'm not telling you what I did buy, but I didn't buy this (though I thought long about it):


Cute, eh? The shoes were especially tempting, although I never wear such a high heel due to extreme laziness. What put me off (besides, oh, you know, the insane price) was how thick and stiff the skirt material was --- it looked very uncomfortable when I just held it. But I do love geometrics, and those colors! I'm not such a flowers-and-rainbows kinda girl. My bedroom was black and red and white back in high school and I've been thinking I should return to that scheme. But on the other hand my mother, who's much older (I'm the youngest by a lot), dressed in the worst excesses of barfy 60s-mod prints all the way up until the 80s, when the whole "now sailor motifs and chains are popular" thing came in and she switched over to that. So right now the stuff in the stores feels overly familiar in both a comforting and a terrifying, I-need-to-rebel-against-mom-by-running-in-the-opposite-direction way. Maybe I will return to the retro fashion cycles and how they confuse me so in a future post.

Bullets of Dissertation

• I'm back in the library.
• I'm going to be posting a lot the next few days as I force myself to come in and work. Be careful you don't die of boredom reading my posts.
  
• This morning I worked from 9 to 10:15 in the coffeeshop, when my computer abruptly and unexpectedly died. I did some errands on the way to pick up the power cord and that ate up an hour. Bleah.
• So far I have almost finished up a paragraph. That and I wrote The Footnote That Ate Cleveland. I'm not sure it's quite big enough ---- I want to make sure it has a fighting chance against Godzilla, and right now I think it would only be able to take on Mothra in rigged fight. So it's back to feeding it some radioactive, mutated growth food!
  
• You wouldn't think it, but Joy Division actually works as writing music. What does it say about me though that my favorite song of theirs is the one where they quote the sick Nazi novel about the sexual experiments in the camps? In my defense, it has the best drum riffs and is nice and clangy sounding.
  
• It's very nice outside but I can't find an outlet for my laptop. It is extremely stuffy in my library cubicle and it's freezing out here where I have internet access.
  
• lit review goes here Oh wait, this is my relaxation writing, not my work. Never mind.
• I'm getting a little tired. The good news is that I have tons of mindless quote-checking and book-pulling now to get this passage up to complete beauteousness. The bad news is I have tones of mindless quote-checking and book-pulling on my to-do list now.
• I still need to swim today (I skipped yesterday.) Maybe if I can force myself through most of the afternoon I'll be able to swim in the late afternoon and avoid the horrible feeling of swimming on a full stomach.
  
• My life is boring and I have neither interesting goofing off stories nor actual interesting chapter work to show for this latest period of boringness. Grumph.
  

Dissertation Jail

I have sentenced myself to the library to serve out my time on chapter 5. It is only somewhat working. So far I have written for about an hour ---- I took a paragraph that I roughed out on Wed. and rewrote it, and spliced in the critics I am responding to (now it is a nice paragraph). But now I am restless and my brain is loose, like how after a really hard swim or run you can't even clench your fist any more. I went and returned some keys and videos as a break. Now I still feel blah. It might be because the lib. is so stuffy in here --- perhaps I shall go and work on the next section, which I have printed out, outside in the fresh air. I might get another hour out of that, and then I can break for lunch.

It is hard going from "an hour or so here and there" to "now you have a full open day to dissertate for 8 hours or more." However, I have deadlines, people, and I can't just go on at my turtle pace for this home stretch. Gar. Grah! Bleah!

I also have the final papers from my students but I won't even touch them today. I can do them on Sunday or something, after having really driven myself nuts on the chapter writing.

Ok ---- pushing myself away from the table and going off to stare at a different section of my chapter now. Any words of encouragement and silliness are appreciated, as I'll probably be back here for another break in a little bit ---- but not until I turn this blob of notes and quotes into another paragraph!

Update: Ok, so where are all my supportive and helpful comments? Tphthththththtth! You all are either falling down on the job or have gone off to have fun this Friday, and I am grumpy about both those options.

What I have done: I wrote for another hour outside and typed it all in. That was another roughed-out paragraph that needed fixing. Then I took a short break, then I tweaked a mostly-done paragraph. Then I ate lunch. So that's three crappy paragraphs turned into actual paragraphs! (Ok, I write sloooooow. I usually either rough out or write up a paragraph a day, so it's more like a 1/2 paragraph every day in my "little bit at a time" system. If I were to continue at that pace I wouldn't have everything cleaned up for another year, I feel. Anyway.)

After I ate, I felt all tired and blah. I've been "puttering" more than working ---- I grabbed some books, played with the biblio for a while, pulled more quotes and dumped them here and there ---- nothing really substantial. Then I took an internet reading break, and here I am.

What next? that is the question. I could do some more biblio work and some more checking details against this book I got out (I hate it when I take notes and then the topic shifts, so that I don' t have exact notes on the new stuff I want to reference.) I could also print out what I've got and stare at it a while. (Or I could take a nap.) Who said that? WHO? Don't you go napping the day away missy! You've got craploads left to write!