I've been floating in the ether for the past few days because last week I found out that I'm done with the proposal process. The fourth member of my committee finally signed off, and two of my committee members gave me very warm comments. Where does this leave me? Well, since the semester is now coming to a head, I doubt I will accomplish anything else before the beginning of the summer. So basically, I can finish out the semester with the knowledge that I've now joined the ranks of the thousands of dissertators across the nation. Really, when you begin to do the math, my god, there are a lot of dissertators out there. Even more, when you realize that there are always more dissertators than you can actually see. If you've ever attended grad school, you'll know what I mean. There are always those shadowy ninth, tenth, and eleventh year people, who are virtually indistinguishable from the civilians out there. There are so many, they are seriously coming out of the woodwork. So here I am, one of their proud numbers, and I can finally live up to the title of my blog.
Looking back over the proposal writing process, I guess I'd describe it as more a psychological journey than the gradual process of revelation that research is sometimes glorified to be. What I mean is that I spent most of my time trying not to outsmart myself. Since I'm so anti-procrastination (even though I have a chapter on its merits), my excuses for deferring work have to be convincing enough that they pass procrastination muster. For example, I can trick myself with a false sense of accomplishment, which allows me to step away from my work contented. Or, I'll choose to eat cheese for lunch since it's faster than making a meal (productive, see) and then eat so much that I'm out of commission for the day. In fact, the writer's block of cheese is possibly the oldest and most successful trick in my book. This I admit is where most of my energy was directed, carefully scrutinizing all of my excuses to stop working. For instance, even as I write this post, I'm beginning to grow suspicious of it. Am I embellishing my feeling of accomplishment so that it will last even longer, giving myself yet another excuse to put off actually starting my dissertation?
In spell checking this post, I noticed that the blogger spell checker doesn't recognize the word 'blog.' Jen is telling me that I should write to them.
3 comments:
jen is right.
the block of cheese is a great procrastination tool almost as good as the big mac, which is both a procrastination tool and a sleep aid. they need to put a label on those things: may cause severe, sometimes fatal, food coma. i mean, if you are going to sell big macs to people at drive thrus, you might as well also sell liquor.
(yo kevin, give me some of your tots)
when I was in Italy, I found it so amusing that you could get beer at McDonalds that I took a picture of myself drinking a beer next to Ronald. while this was happening, some punked out Italian who knew Gianluca (the Italian who was putting me up) came over and thought it amusing. So he sat with me for a picture, and now I have this photo of me, Ronald, a beer, and some rad italian.
i had a similar experience except that i was so excited that you could get beer at mcdonalds that i would get it at 10am with my mcmuffin.
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