Not Concentrating

More on this later

There is a very long story behind this picture.  That is the only road that gets you anywhere when you're 13 miles outside of Page, AZ.  And that is a very long line of parked cars.

On the run

Today, officially, I start to drive away.  It's been a ridiculous few weeks, but they're over now and off I go.  I will possibly be updating here from the road, but it seems far more likely that little updates will show up at flickr, twitter, or what-have-you before I get the chance to sit down and write anything interesting here.

I'll be on the road for at least two weeks, so I'm sure there will be tons to say by the time I'm done getting where I'm going.  In the meanwhile, keep me posted.

... and so it begins

In with the old?

Almost a week ago, I completed the first of two oral components to the Ph.D. degree, a kind of general field literature exam, if that makes any sense.  If it doesn't, I won't bother you with it.  The bottom line is that as of Friday, June 20 what I'm left with here is just (just!) to write the dissertation.  I don't know that I can even begin to explain what that means.  The dissertation, sure, people know what that is -- it's book-length, it takes ages (three years, if I'm lucky), and no one but my advisors are likely ever to read it.

This last week has been a bit bizarre, finishing the exam and all.  For one thing, it means finishing the huge first stage of this degree.  Three years of coursework is tons -- most programs have one or two -- and it has been a bit of a rough ride, long and trying.  In those three years, the concept of a dissertation was always there, waiting for me at the end like some kind of beacon.  My classmates and I often sit around and talk about how we can't wait to get out of the ridiculousness of coursework so we can finally get to do what we came here to do.  Research!  Write!  Be free of this insane quarter-system, 11-week rigamarole!  Three years of waiting, three years of wading.

The flip side of that, too, is, holy crap, how am I supposed to do this?  As of a week ago, I am no longer accountable to anyone's schedule but my own.  It's amazing, really.  I've spent several years talking to friends as they go through this process of trying to find their new footing, so you'd think I'd be prepared, but this disorientation -- this open-ended-ness -- is still a little disconcerting.  Suddenly, I'm on my own.  For a while now I've been walking around with a decent general idea of what my dissertation will be, but I've always known it was too big, too sprawling; there were problems that would be dealt with later.  In due time.  Now I have to figure out how to corral it, how to make it work.  Actually.  In real time. 

The thing is, too, that in the middle of this, the end of coursework also means the end of needing to be here at school every day.  No more TAing, no more lectures, no more seminars.  Just me and the books and the movies.  So I can, finally, feel free not to live in campus housing.  I can have a semblance of a normal life, where I can go out for dinner at night or maybe a hike on the weekend without feeling the heavy weight of the world on my shoulders.  At least that's the plan.  The usual course of events is that people move up to the city, where there's more to do, more freedom, and a complete change of pace.  But the decision for me has been that, rather than moving to San Francisco, I'm going to move to western Massachusetts.  This is a decision I made a long time ago, and it wasn't an easy one.  There are a lot of compelling reasons to stay, and many to leave. 

Nonetheless, I'm headed back east, again,* after a nice long drive and a visit to Spiral Jetty.  I'm excited to be going back to the same time zone as so many of my friends, and even to be going to work in a whole new academic environment -- new people, new climate, new routine -- but I don't think anyone would believe me if I said I'm not going to miss California and my friends here.  And the sunlight.  And, seriously, the pools.

In the meanwhile, I'll be here for another three weeks or so, trying to take care of all kinds of unfinished business, like finally making a trip up to Heath Ceramics and maybe even participating in a race with Ariel (my first!), though since it involves a 5k run and I can't even remember the last time I ran a mile, it may not happen.  Only time will tell.  I'll keep you posted.

* Have you been keeping track?  Yes, that's four cross-country moves in nine years.

Procrastination is the new black

Procrastination can be all kinds of things: baking, cleaning, reading the newspaper, taking a nap, you know how it goes.  Often for me it's just sitting at my desk and continually checking my email and my Scrabulous games, again and again, for what can feel like hours at a time.  The worst extended moments of procrastination are when I'm writing, since it's a very un-concrete process that can also be painstakingly slow.

As of today, there are mere days left before my oral exam.  I need to be reviewing all my notes and making connections between all the books.  And writing my presentation.  But the far easier (and much more straight forward) thing to do is to keep reading and keep taking notes.  It's productive!  And still very much a distraction from what really needs to be happening.  

Next up is re-painting my toenails.

I'm doing OK, thanks. Really. I think. Maybe.

My oral exams are in 12 days.

Recently, whenever people see me, they ask me how I'm doing.  Am I holding up OK?  Am I surviving?  I'm the only member of my class to take the exam this year, and everyone knows what's going on.  Everyone is concerned.  This is pretty normal -- when friends have gone through exams I've tried to be as supportive as possible, making sure that they eat, sleep, and you know, not wither away.  Most of the time in the last few weeks my answer has been pretty much the same: I'm doing far better than I would ever have expected at this stage of the game.  I'm still sleeping through the night.  I'm still eating pretty normally.  I've been so busy with classes and the TAing that it's been hard to really get too freaked out.

For the most part, all of that is true. Sure, I've been waking up pretty early and not feeling particularly tired.  But that's to be expected.  Really, though, I think it's all part of yet another way in which my body has decided to cope with stress; this exam, which has been on my mind for a year now, has woven itself deep into some part of my consciousness and is playing all kinds of tricks on me.  New this month has been an extraordinary amount of particularly absent-minded behavior like when, the other day, I was convinced someone had stolen my empty laundry bag.  This was not the case.  So now I'm maybe not a blithering, barely conscious and vaguely hungry idiot, but I am a one-woman side show.

Always good to keep people entertained, I guess.

Overnight Coffeecake

The coffeecake(s) have come and gone.  I am happy, relieved, and proud to say that the recipe was a success, with everyone at school enjoying the result.  If there's a next time, I definitely will make this with the chocolate variation -- as it is the cake is good, and the hazelnuts cut the sweetness nicely, but I'm not a hugely sugary person, and think this could be even better with a bunch of chocolate in the mix, which I guess would make it a lot like rugelach.

Living in a bubble

Last week a friend of mine was in San Francisco for a few days and came down to campus on her way out of town.  I gave her the opportunity to go for a swim before she boarded another airplane; it was an offer she couldn't refuse. 

We swam for a bit in the morning and had some lunch.  It was a gorgeous day and we had enough time to meander around and enjoy the scenery.  But then poor Rebecca got dragged through the art building before sitting in on a class lecture about psychoanalytic film criticism (since I'd also offered to drive her to the airport).  In the course of only about three minutes in the grad student lounge, Rebecca was subjected to an intense (and rather heated) discussion among four of the graduate students in my department that was about -- and I'm not kidding -- citations. Kevin declared that he simply does not cite unless it is absolutely necessary and set off a whirlwind of verbal rebuttals.

Regardless of where you stand on this hotly debated topic, it was an odd moment.  Really, who talks about this stuff?  When did someone's citation habits become so contentious?  I was immediately and very uncomfortably aware that there was a non-academic in the room. This kind of ridiculousness easily could  have consumed 30-minutes of my day, but did my poor, unsuspecting friend really need to witness it? No, she didn't, and we left while the getting was good.  Still, she got a kick out of it.

But this happens every once in a while -- I remember that 99% of the people I interact with are steeped in academic ways of life and that those ways of life are just insanely and ridiculously arcane. 

And, really, this is why people think that academics are such wackos.  

I totally understand

It makes perfect sense to me that you don't find my sleep habits interesting.  I could discuss them for hours (and have), though.  Then again, I don't leave my house much, so I guess that means that I spend a lot of time talking to myself about my sleep habits.  Which must be why I have so many friends.

Honestly, in the last few weeks I've thought about sleeping, eating, and swimming.  And working.  So I've been at a bit of a loss. 

I realized yesterday that this is the time of the quarter when I tend to get very angry at pretty much everyone and everything: Cut me off at a crosswalk?  I'll curse you out for hours. 

In the middle of all this, I've agreed to make an Overnight Coffee Cake, which is definitely a good thing, if for no other reason than that I'll maybe wear out all my curses as I fight with the yeast dough this weekend.  Which I'm looking forward to.  Perhaps a battle of wills?  We'll see who's got more gusto, won't we.

Tis the season

This morning I made a tray of coffee ice cubes.

Tomorrow it's supposed to hit 100 degrees.