Three Years? Wow.

It’s Been Real?

Update 5/10/09: I realized that this original post was the result of an imbalanced life — mostly due to dissertation-finishing stress. I’m back to blogging here again, and I’ve transformed it a bit into more of a “hey, this is our life and this is what we’re doing” blog for our friends and family to keep up with us. It’ll be updated as the need arises, so y’all should check in periodically.

Actually, no, it hasn’t, and that’s part of why this is my last post. I’ve posted here about my, er, “fondness” for the internet. Or rather, the narcissistic search for fulfillment through various vicarious internet outlets. Blogs, photo sharing, etc., it’s all a way to seek self-importance, a way to affirm existence. And the more I think about it, the more false it seems. I spend way more time making posts, checking comments, making comments, etc. than I do actually doing things worth posting about or commenting about.

So here’s the thing, Internet, I think we should see other people. We can absolutely still be friends, but I just don’t think this whole “exclusive” thing is working out. I don’t like how dependent on you I’ve become. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I just think we spend too much time together. It’s not that I find you unpleasant — quite the contrary — I just feel like I’m missing out on a lot of other great things.

So this blog is going away, along with a few other “droppings” I’ve left around the Internet. I’m tired of the incessant demands on my time — real or imagined — and I’ve decided to live less of my life (much, much less) behind a keyboard and a computer screen. The other day, I added it all up, and I literally spent an hour and a half of otherwise-productive time just messing around online. I’m sure this is much less than a lot of people, but to me it’s unacceptable to lose time like that for no good reason.

If you read this blog for updates about what’s going on with me (I think there are a couple of you), just drop me an email every once in a while, and I promise I’ll do the same. I’ll leave this blog up for a little while, just so everyone gets the message, then down it comes, and this little patch of Interwebs reverts to its wild, uncultivated state. Thanks for reading, folks, and if I may, please use the time you would have spent reading my posts to do something enriching, productive, and worthwhile.

Stack o’ Papers

Well, here it is. This is my dissertation. 440 pages. Second photo is the stack of three that were mailed off today to my committee.

Phoo. Also found out today that I had an article accepted to a journal I submitted to back in November. It’s quite a good journal, a nice step up from what I’ve already been published in, and a good stepping stone to the next tier. Annnd, probably the most exciting news is that we bought a new bed today. A real growd-up bed with a frame and box spring and everything. It was quite necessary, since our former bed was literally hurting us. Badly. Very badly. I can’t even tell you how excited I am to go to bed tonight. And then to get up and NOT work on my dissertation! It’s like a whole new lease on life. You think I’m kidding, but…

Hangin’ In…

Yup, I’m still here, grinding my way towards the first week in March, when I’ll finally send off the draft of my dissertation for the defense on March 31 (confirmed now, tickets bought). It’s been an okay grind, actually, with only a sightly more than usual work schedule. Pretty doable for the most part, and only mild panic in occassional spells. Of course, I still harbor the persistant fear that I’ll get all the way to the defense and my committee will say, “uh, seriously, it took you three years to churn out this steaming pile?” Or, “well, it’s basically sound, but before you can graduate you just have to change everything about it.” Or something equally devastating.

The weather has been wonderfully wintry around these parts lately, with rain, wind, chillyness, etc. It’s nice, especially considering it was in the 80s last month and probably will be again next month. Supposedly, we’re actually ahead of our rainfall totals for this time of year. This bodes well for wildflowers in a couple months, so I’m planning a canyon tour by bike for sometime after the diss is done.  I might even be pesuaded to go out to the desert (not by bike, though), where there are supposedly wonderful wildflowers in the spring, especially in wet years. I don’t know about that–we’ll see.

I’ve started volunteering on Saturday mornings at the local historical society, doing some reprocessing of one of their collections that is of relevance to my research. I’m thinking I’ll probably take on another project there when this one is finished, too. It’ll help me broaden my experience base a bit within my profession and hopefully give me a slightly broader range of employment options.

Anyhoo, back to work.

January 12, 2009

January 12th?!

12th?! How did that happen?! Hmm. Well, anyway, I’ve got mixed results from my Great Work Habits Experiment over the last few days. First, I remembered why I don’t work in a totally free-form way: I hate it. I need the structure, so sue me. I need to work like I’m at work: like I’ve got a boss and deadlines and performance quotas, etc. It’s too hard for me to measure progress otherwise. My dad and wife asked, so how did it go? Did you get lots of work done? And I said yes, which is true, but without a set schedule, I can’t really say how much I got done.

This has been a theme for me, all through college and grad school. I don’t necessarily want to have every aspect of my life scheduled to the hilt, but at the same time, I really thrive in a schedule. My wife is the same way, which is good. In fact, we’ve decided to schedule other aspects of our lives, too. We both suffer from a pretty profound laziness (which anyone who knows us will doubt, but really it’s true), and without a schedule, we tend to take paths of least resistance that quickly become ruts if we don’t occassionally try to shake ourselves out of them. So, we’re working on work schedules, recreation schedules, social life schedules, etc. It sounds a bit OCD and soccer-mom-y, but I think it’s what it’s going to take, at least initially, for both of us to shake the inertia we’ve both been feeling lately.

December 31, 2008

Gurg. Now I have a cold, too. It seems to be a fast-moving one, though, so hopefully it will pass on before too long.

I got back to work yesterday after our vacation(?) during the last two weeks or so. I’ve been mostly working on reading and preparing some comments on a colleague’s chapters. Whenever I read drafts of someone else’s work, I can’t help but think about what process they went through as they wrote. Was it anything like mine? How many times have certain sentences been rewritten? Paragraphs moved around? Specific words deliberated over? It’s also good to see someone else’s work in a draft stage because it reminds me that we all go through a process as we write, not just pop out a finished product, which is what you most often see of someone’s work. It’s the writer’s equivalent of being reminded that we all put our pants on one leg at a time, as my mom used to say.

Today is going to be some serious work on my diss and preparing some materials for a fellowship application. And drinking a lot of green tea and probably blowing my nose a lot. Happy New Year!

November 30, 2008

The end of another month always seems like a good time to take stock and check in with the status of various personal and professional projects. Several recent conversations in our household have highlighted the necessity of me finding some sort of paying work, even before the dissertation is complete. We’re finding our budget stretched a bit thin lately, and upcoming conference travel and tuition is going to take a toll. I’ve put out a few inquires about random jobs in my area, but I need to get more serious about it. Having the diss almost finished has been a convenient crutch for me to say “I’ll just wait until it’s done before I get serious about a job search.” Well, as the economy seems to worsen, and we start to wonder about our future, it’s looking more and more necessary to get a bit more serious with myself about career direction. I still want writing to be my main focus and I’ve got loads of article and book projects in the work queue, including some forays into fiction, but those things don’t pay off for a long time (and not often in loads of cash).

That’s really where the bulk of my energies are going to be directed for a while-finding something that brings in some extra money. This will have the added benefit of making my own work/writing time all the more precious, and hopefully spurring me to make better use of the time spent at my desk. At the same time, I have this new bicycle restoration project, which is going to be a long-term one, and which will give me something to use my hands and brain in a different way. I’ve definitely found this to be necessary for my work style; having something that I can do physically and that has an immediate, tangible result is very satisfying after puzzling over a sentence or a paragraph or a concept for an afternoon. Academic work is so nebulous when it comes to actual production. What IS an academic product? A book? An article? An idea? A chapter? A paragraph? A sentence? A word? At least with an old bicycle, I can make a real change, a visible change, in the course of an afternoon’s work. Progress is physical and evident, and thus easier to measure.

Anyway, so I’m working towards a few new things for me: coming to terms with what I expect from my work; understanding that “my work” and “my job” are going to have to become two different things; and actually trying to redefine or tweak how I actually think of myself, both personally and professionally. Ah, personal growth. Why does it have to be so hard?

November 26, 2008

It’s so easy to get led astray from our best intentions. I initially started this blog to help me keep a sense of balance in life. I typically go from long periods of intense work to long periods of intense inactivity, each of which is accompanied by its own set of stressors. The idea behind blogging was to write something every day about life, work, balance, or just whatever, to help keep everything in perspective. Almost immediately, I started second-guessing myself, thinking “oh, I don’t have anything interesting to say today,” and not making a post. That tendency has gotten worse, until I only post occasionally when I feel like I really have something to say. Well, I’m going to start trying to do it every day again. We’ll see what happens.

So anyway, here’s a few of the things that have been going on (in no particular order):

• It rained really hard all night last night, the first time in a long time here, and now it’s cool and cloudy and wet and like a proper fall, finally.
• I finished some articles and got them sent off to journals (see previous post).
• The left pedal is stuck on the Runwell and I’m worried that I’ve mangled the spindle so that it won’t come off the crank arm.
• I’ve sent off inquiries to two part-time jobs I found on Craigslist.
• I finally signed up for eBay to bid on an old bicycle in my area, lost, and disliked the experience so much, I will never eBay again.
• I turned 29 years old.
• I started two new articles.
• I finished reading Herman Melville’s Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1854).

So yeah, I’m going to try to write about stuff like this more often, hopefully every day. I don’t care if nobody reads it really, it’s more for me than anybody else.

Onward & Upward

The wide variety of tasks that seem to constitute my daily routine continues to surprise and confound me. One minute, I’m elbow deep in hand-washing a bucket of filthy rags from my old bike project, the next I’m revising an article draft. Then, I’m sending an email, clearing a clogged sink, doing the laundry, and reading over a dissertation chapter (not simultaneously, mind you).  It’s always exciting around here (that’s just a little sarcasm, there). 

Done:

Dishes

Laundry

2 blog posts (not including this one)

Started sanding old bike fenders

Worked on clearing bathroom sink drain

Finished reading/editing dissertation

Started bike project rear wheel reassembly

Not Done:

Finish Article #2

Stay-at-Home

It’s taken me a long time to admit something to myself: that I am, at least for the time-being, a stay-at-home.  I’ve been one before, mind you, but not always in such a complete way.  And I’ve also recently decided that’s okay. Instead of agonizing about how keeping the house from descending into an abysmal mess of dirty dishes, cat hair drifts, and piles of junk mail is only keeping me from what I should be doing (reading, writing, academic-ing), I’ve decided that I need to embrace the diversity of tasks to which I am called in the course of an ordinary day.  Take yesterday for example.  Here’s what I did, in roughly chronological order:

Started reading a colleague’s chapter draft

Wrote bills

Updated my Old Bike Blog

Worked on my current bike project

Investigated the clogged pipes under the kitchen sink

Made lunch and checked the mail

Continued reading colleague’s chapter draft

Made dinner

Took the cat for a walk

Did the dishes

This was actually a less productive work day than usual, due primarily to the #$%&*! kitchen sink, which my equally #$%&*! landlord can’t fix because he’s in #$%&*! Michigan for two weeks and didn’t bother to tell any of us until I called yesterday.  Incidentally, washing the dishes took about twice as long as a result of the clogged sink, I’ll spare you the details.

Anyway, the point is that I’m pretty lucky to have the time and space to do all of these things as they need to get done, and instead of looking at my work as a nine-to-five endeavor, intruded upon by the niggling little everyday tasks of life, I need to consider my time more holistically.  It’s all my time, and it’s choosing to make productive use of it, whether by working or house-working, that’s important.  Otherwise, I come to resent the life tasks that “take away” from my work time, and in the process, end up resenting my life at the expense of my work.  And that’s just not okay with me.