A Public Service Announcement for new lit. ABDs: Subheads Are the Fucking BOMB!

Now I know that every time I try to give advice to anybody through this blog there is an outcry of complaint and indignation, but this helpful tidbit I have offered to two fellow grads now (in a shorter version) and it has worked. And I am writing from a very good place at this moment, stuffed full of delicious chips and salsa and getting a buzz off those lovely carbs, so I am feeling magnanimous with the advice. Avuncular, even. (What would the term be for "aunt-like"? hmm.) To everyone else who is not newly or approaching ABD-ness: be warned; I'm going to talk about writing. And there will be Bizarre Metaphors.

First of all, writing a dissertation seems scary, if you don't approach it right. It is totally different from the earlier aspects of grad school, which involve taking courses and exams and writing seminar papers --- all of which bear some resemblance to the undergrad or MA experience. But after you pass whatever exam allows you to go ABD (all but dissertation), you are thrown into a situation with very little in the way of deadlines, or markers, or guidance. You might even feel a bit adrift.

But don't worry, just because you don't know how to start or where to go. You actually know a lot more than you think you do. If you start thinking about "writing a dissertation," you may actually paralyze yourself with fear. You should never think about "the dissertation" ---- save the big-picture view for the rare moments when the light is just right, the planets are aligned, and you are all aglow with the pleasures of some recent academic accomplishment. Instead of a panoramic view, you will need to develop protective tunnel vision. Or those blinders they put on horses to make them less skittish when they pull the milk carts. Or maybe the mirrored shield that allowed Perseus to slay the Medusa. (Someone please, stop the metaphors!)

Anyway, you think you are at sea, but you've actually weathered the big storm and made it safe to land by the time you are officially ABD:


Note that I didn't say it would be easy after this point. Oh look --- while your advisors aren't here, they left you some helpful tools!

The trick is to just jump right in to work. The longer you wait to start writing, the more daunting and big the whole task becomes. That's where the magic of subheads come in. Dissertation? --- big and scary sounding. Dissertation chapter? --- still big and scary. How long are they supposed to be? I don't know how to write one! But, by this point you are an old hand at taking seminars and writing seminar papers, right? If you break up your chapters by three or four (or maybe even five, depending on the lengths you want) subheads, then you can think of one as being just like writing a seminar paper --- you can handle a little ol' 15-pager, right?

Don't even think about the whole diss or other chapters or the other subsections at the moment --- just pick up your main text for the chapter and start bashing out some close reading. One friend took almost a year to start writing. "Why don't you just start freewriting on Major Text?" I asked. "Find some patterns and start writing about why MT interests you in relation to ---- what is it, the sublime?" "But I need to know everything about the MT and the concept of the sublime before I know what my argument is," replied the friend. "No, no ---- write up a bad seminar paper ---- even five pages. Then start making a list of what specific things you need to prove your argument and what things you will be expected to be familiar with in your footnotes. After you get about 6 or so things on your to-do list, start getting them and mixing them in (don't make the to-do list so long that you paralyze yourself though)."

Of course, you won't keep that first freewrite. (I didn't tell my friend that) It will disappear at some point of the revisions. It's just that knowing you have already started and have some pages is a great motivator and helps break you out of paralysis. Just keep focused on the little, small, do-able tasks, one foot in front of the other. And before long you are a paragon of industriousness:

Almost before you know it, you will be deep in the work of writing and will scarcely notice the time passing. Now, since dissertation-writing time is very unstructured, you should diligently keep track of your schedule and progress. Find whatever time-management systems work for you and implement them: I should add that for some people, the isolation of working alone on the dissertation for such a long time can make them skittish and unused to dealing with other people, so you might want to take steps to prevent that.
Eventually, you'll be finished with this trying time in your life and able to move on to bigger and better things, like working as a tenure-track professor. Which entails, um, I think, traveling through Spain and slaughtering hundreds of wolves. I wouldn't know; I haven't gotten there yet.

Flaming Cheese Productions

It's so weird to be on the job market and in school and then go look up on Sitemeter where my readers are coming from. Hey, I've been there! And there! Ooh, I went to school there! And there! (I've gotten hits from all the UCs except UCSF now; maybe I'll start keeping track of the CSUs, just for kicks. I have only visited half of the UCs and less than a quarter of the CSUs; part of me wants to do a road trip just to collect the complete set. I'm all about complete sets, people.)

Then you get the slightly paranoid feeling: ooh, I applied there, and there, and there, and last year I applied there and there. Are these future colleagues (or maybe future application rejectors) reading my blog? Should I censor myself or start talking about how hard I work instead of pie and how well I procrastinate?

There's also a strange reaction I have when someone from one of the "real schools" like Yale or Hahh-vad has been reading: wait, surely everyone there is too busy creating cold fusion or being fed peeled grapes from the hands of adoring undergraduates to actually do something as mundane as read an academic blog! Just the fact that I call them "real" in my head first thing says volumes about my assumptions about class and academe, assumptions which may or may not be completely fucked up. But those are my thoughts, so there it is.

Having been around a while, I also get a jolt of recognition whenever a school that one of my grad colleagues has gotten a job at pops up. Ooh, look --- someone I know works there! Chances are slim that this random visitor is even in the English department, but it makes me happy anyway.

Ever since I wrote that post asking for help on writing a teaching philosophy (a belated thanks to everyone for the advice, by the way), searches that bring people here have been boring, all consisting of "how to write a teaching philosophy statement for ________" Bleah!. But I have been keeping track of the search phrases that pleased me for a while now, including the title of this post. If ever I start a production company, I swear to you, that is what it shall be called.

And since there's not much going on in my life right now, I thought I'd share some of the most interesting search strings from my sitemeter:

• eating strange things

• stupidest question in the world

(I wonder what that would be, anyway? I know about the funniest joke in the world, but...)

• the rocks in my head

• is a B minus a bad grade

(answer: that depends. Thanks for joining us on Dr. Cog's Advice Hour!)

• “win a pre-paid cremation?”

• lust in leather

(Ooh, I think I didn't live up to what you were looking for, luv.)

• food poisoning puke

(why yes, that is what grad school can be like)

• in grad school behind on work can't motivate

(So you came here to hang out with me? Pass the chips and the remote.)

• hot patterns drainpipe pants

(niiiiice. Reminds me I need to have my 80s party still.)

• can you hand in a paper late in graduate school

(don't do it, man! the spring I took an incomplete created the wost summer I ever avoided writing a paper in.)

• is burning rubber smell sign of a brain tumour

(uh, wrong kind of doctor here. Good luck with that one, dude)

• sculptures made out of everyday objects – pictures

• should i feel stupid about failing phd field exams?

(stupider than having to google search about it? I kid, I kid.)

• rabbit stuck in couch

• Foucault corporate control

(from ralphlauren.com --- creepy!)

• "i love lucy" ignoring the signs of impending trouble

(from the State of Georgia board of regents web site… someone has to fill me in on this, including what it has to do with me…)

Avoidance Maneuvers

So, I'm back in my apt again and dealing with all the little crap that returning entails --- things are being unpacked, and cleaned, and cooked, and moved around, and avoided. Mostly the laundry is being avoided along with some mending, but I am also avoiding the job wiki. (Good going, kid! Keep it up and your sanity may yet return!)

I am also avoiding the dissertation, which is not so good. Like usual, I overplanned my trip to my parents' and brought along more stuff than I could do, both academic and not (witness the mending) and then spent the long weekend talking to family, vegging in front of the tv or computer (or both at once) and generally doing nothing. Not that this is a bad thing, esp. the whole reconnect-with-family thing, but oddly enough all that vegitating did not put me in a bright and cheerful up-and-at-em mood that would make me tackle my dissertation. Actually, it just made me want to vegitate longer. Now that's counterproductive. If anybody finds my mojo, please return it.

(Side note: Inside Higher Ed linked to me today, I see --- meaning that I got a huge number of hits without having any new material on the page, and in fact, while driving across California and away from the computer. I don't think my post on Scum Letters is one of my better ones, but what the hey. (Slow week on the web, or was the IHE compiler phoning it in this week? Who knows?) But anyway --- welcome, new people! This is actually part of my diabolical plan to lure you in and bore you to death with the trivia of my life. Hop in, the monotony's fine!)

I hope that I will magically put myself back in the mood tomorrow morning --- my plan to finish at least a solid draft of this chapter by MLA seems to be melting in the air. See that word counter moving over there to the side? Neither do I.

When I worked that one morning (Thurs? Fri? I'm too lazy to check my post) at my parents', I spent the majority of the time reviewing what I had and re-familiarizing myself with it, and I think that needs to happen yet again, now that I am back in my usual work place. This means I've "rebooted" my thoughts on this chapter at least 3 times now this month. Gah. And worse, each time I do that I run the risk of coming up with a new and different (or just wrong) throughline argument for the work, depending on what I've most recently said or read or seen. (For example, I saw Shooter with the fam and ranted about it and now I run the risk of making my chapter be entirely about why libertarians suck. This has nothing to do with my topic. But I just may blog about it, if I can do that without it derailing my actual chapter argument.) How to balance being disengaged enough from the world to really focus on what I need to write, while not being so disengaged that I feel like I'm living under a rock and I make myself so depressed I can't do any work? (In other words, I need to roll my rock not hide under it, heh.)

(Other side note ---- we need to be balanced or else the craft will tip over ---- it's been awfully silent on the request-for-more-materials front. Now, search committees, you had off for Thanksgiving and I didn't bug you, and Monday and Tuesday to come back and start going through your piles of initial materials. Now can I have some happy emails? Please? I have pie if you want. I also have cake, since we finally celebrated my birthday last night. It's chocolate...)

Now my brilliant plan was to use the writing challenge month to distract me from the job search waiting game. This has backfired. Unfortunately, boring stuff you don't want to do is not actually very distracting or engaging. And not working on the diss, especially when you're feeling at your back the cold blast of debt and the rattle of obligations, and are fully cognizant of being ABD as a detriment on the job search, only serves to intensify your anxiety and depression. On the other hand, cheer up: there's always tomorrow for a change of mood and a new start. After all, tomorrow is ... hmm. What's the quote I'm looking for? "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, / To the last syllable of recorded time; / And all our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death."

Hmm. Maybe that's not quite what I intended...

I'm not in a rural area at all...

So I don't understand why my parents' back yard has become a wildlife habitat preserve. But, it has:

Ok, squirrels, cats, the odd gopher, BFD, I hear you saying. But it is a little more unusual to be adopted by a flock of wild turkeys, especially considering we live so close to the freeway and multi-lane streets:

If I had access to my Photoshop right now I could crop and zoom a bit better for you. I had to run get my camera so the turkey family had time to scuttle to the other end of the yard, and then hide. When I drove up to my parents' house the other evening, there were 30 or so of them roosting on the pointy roof of the main living room. This is a pretty regular occurrence, though only these three seem to have adopted our backyard as a permanent home.

We've been making bad turkey jokes like "a turkey on both your houses" for a while now ... unfortunately if we didn't have opportunities to make bad puns we would invent them, so there's no hope for us. These turkeys must know that we're too suburban as a family to ever bother catching and eating them ourselves, and since my dad hates pets we're probably the only place on the block without a dog to shoo them from the yard.

Anyways, happy holidays from my house, where every day, evidently, is turkey day.

Random bullets of turkey and boredom

• I am in the land of Ultimate Suburbia, or whatever I last named the place of the parents, and I am thinking about renaming it Mount Boredom.
• It is turkey day and I have not yet had turkey. Or pie. Mmm, pie. That is because it is early. Sigh. Why is everything about waiting these days? On the other hand, it smells like spices here. Mmm.
• I wrote for a bit this morning, but I forgot to bring my laptop plug with me, making my laptop as useful as a very expensive brick. I printed out my piles o' stuff I have so far, and then pondered it deeply from inside the Starbucks across the street. It was loud and obnoxious there --- one of the baristas had a voice that could cut through glass. I wrote with my IPod on full blast (skipping the speech-heavy tracks) but could still hear her screeching out "venti half calf no foam extra caramel!" It did not help with producing a Mood of Productivity. I tried writing outside (brr!) but could still hear her outside the cafe. Hmph.
• I can't tell whether I am on the brink of actually figuring out what this chapter will do "to intervene in my field" or if I am avoiding the slog of splicing argument-sections together by noodling around on an abstract level. Either way, it was all in longhand and so I don't have a word count. But words were written, never fear.
• Though I have yet to OD on turkey and trimmings, I have already hit my limit. Of TV and TV ads, that is. I think I've gotten so used to being in a protected bubble of non-tv-ness that I can't handle the sudden explosion into cable at my parents' house. It's just too much commercialism at one sitting for me, and was making me depressed after even a short time. For example: the number of different ads announcing "door buster" sales starting, if not at 6, then at 4 in the morning? Madness! I used to like shopping on the day after t-giving, since it was a free day with not much else to do, but the crowds, the starting at 4 am, the thrashed and crazed look of the places when you get in there at 9 or 10 in the morning, the way the crowds of shoppers seem to take pride in being rude and nasty to the retail salespeople and behave in a near-riot --- ugh. Most obnoxious, to me, is the way that these ads, and some of my family and friends of family, behave as if there is no alternative to shopping and crass consumerism on the day after t-giving (or perhaps at all?) --- a weird holiday which is all about gorging yourself anyway. And my niece worked at Mervyn's for the last couple years as an after-school/holiday job, so I've become increasingly burnt out on the way shoppers treat the workers, especially on high holidays. Is there some sort of assumption that after slaving away serving the family on turkey day you get to go out and be served by someone else the day after, and treat them like shit? I don't understand.
• In other news, there is no movement on the wiki or my email. Unsurprisingly --- if search committees were stupid enough to do work on their holiday weekend, I assume it would be to buckle down under a pile of late grading. But, the waiting still sucks.
• If I can get them onto my mom's computer, I'll post some pics. Mayhap it's time to call up my siblings and start pestering them.
• Oh yeah, and I only got here last night but have had 1) the fight about my birthday list (which will soon become the "what do you mean you have no money" fight) 2) the so- why- don't-you-have-a-job-already/aren't-you-done-with-that-damn-thesis- or- whatever-it-is-yet? fight and surprisingly, it looks like we may actually inaugurate a new topic of nagging, the 3) when-will-you-settle-down-get-married-and-have-grandkids argument. I've been spared this one for a long time, being the youngest and having had the advantage of siblings who reproduced and thus spared me the indignity. I just don't really need people ragging on me on three different fronts of my life right now, especially considering I feel so overwhelmed and wait-y (is there a better word?) on the job stuff that I have just shelved the other parts of my life and am not dealing with them at all right now.
• Finally my dad does not look at all well --- at 78, he's slid from crotchety-old to troubles-with-mobility-and-comprehension old in a way that I really don't like and can't even write about. I'm trying to just not think about it.
• And the best way to avoid that, I think, is to break out the board games and start annoying my nieces and nephews.

Happy Thanksgiving day all!

Things I Could Do Today Instead of Looking at the Wiki

• dishes
• pack for T-giving trip
• hem new jeans
• revisit (find) chapter to-do list
• reread/revise itty-bitty drafted part
• add on to draft by working on Subhead 2
• (I did finish reading the Big Influential Text in My Field today though)
• get presents for my blogger-buddies
• write a substantive blog post (I have these ideas, see)
• do I need more catfood? check
• clean out the folders in my bag (also: clean out two sets of folders at school)
• finish off last Other Job task
• email _____ about DVD
• email other _____ about DVD
• email Cool Scientist Friend because she's cool, and because I saw her at the bus stop today but she was taking a different bus
• rent another movie?
• call my sister and plan holiday break stuff
• sleep
  

Distracted …

I’m in the library … a grad student has no regular hours … well, that and I played hookey with family again yesterday … not including cleaning my place for their visit the day before … someone please shoot the carillon-er; I hate those things … either a bell is mis-tuned or the performer is hitting wrong notes … I can’t concentrate, so distracted … this book is a fascinating topic; why did it turn to pig latin? … distracted … the words on the page swim … they might as well say blah blah interstitial blah blah everywhere … I miss my ex-boyfriend; the insufferable jerk. … no, I don’t mean that … or maybe I do … or what…

Maybe food will snap me back into focus … can you die from too much caffeine? … no, it’s a scattered, not a jittery, distraction … the sky is a wash of gun-metal gray … oh hello, beautiful, you can come home with me … acres of bikes on their kickstands, no locks; why aren’t they stolen? Are there really no poor people in town? … more boys on their skateboards failing to jump the concrete steps … no blood, no broken bones … honey, if you’d cover your tits and your legs you wouldn’t be cold; you look ridiculous with fur boots, mini and your fur hood up; my advice: wear pants … there are sparrows in here, inside the food court … chirp chirp, stab at some crumbs, consider me with a bright little sidecocked eye … why did I order this? I don’t want this … sound washes over me … midway between a bank of Faux News and big-screen football; they blend to a mishmash and wash in and out of focus … Pax Americana … crowds appear to be cheering sprightly blondes announcing regressive socio-economic policies … third-down and our troops may be able make this a real turning-point, make lasting gains if they can only hold damage to a minimum at Basra … now I’ve gone from distracted to sick … glad I didn’t take the super-size only 50 cents more … I throw away the rest of the Ford extended-cab pickup and leave some crumbs for the sparrow … where did it go? … still no sun … eating didn’t help at all, still distracted … my family tells me that Younger Cousin is dating the offspring of someone famous yet again ... he has a facility with that... it's like another planet to me ... why bother? ... at least it’s pleasantly warm in the lib. after that walk rather than oppressively so… girl you’ve got to get over yourself and focus, you have things to do … why did I even get out of my nice warm empty bed this morning?... oh yeah … focus… focus…