Okay, enough with that maudlin self-pitying crap! My MLA roommate has a campus interview! Good things are hovering overhead, in the neighborhood, landing in the next street.
Wiki watching has become a full-time occupation, even though I'm now not looking as much for me as for good news about others. It's a weird dance when I see a school that I know a friend has interviewed for. Do I email? Do I dare to eat a peach? (Eat the damn peach, say I to Prufrock.) So I did. And good news! I hope it's always like that -- my friends, both at Midwestern U and in the blogosphere, deserve every interviewer to bring them to their campuses.
In dissertation news, I am trying to really grok one reality: in the dissertation world, plans must be revised. Writing one chapter is not like writing another chapter. I can really write like a demon for a while, but then when it's over, I must rest. Can I say that Chapter 2 will take me a month? Easily. But can I say that Chapter 3 then is February's challenge? No, says my brilliant dissertation coach. Because I will likely need two weeks off after I turn it in. And if I get a campus interview at the job-I-once-thought-I-wanted-who-didn't-interview-at-MLA? Well, then. I turned ferociously to my dissertation coach at our meeting this afternoon: I can't apply to any more jobs. And he said, totally taking me seriously: so don't.
So I'm not. I think.
Don't you think that meeting with one's dissertation coach and coming up with a plan and a schedule counts as work? I do. I'll take the rest of the day off.
2 comments:
It's absolutely work - so is returning books to the library and checking references! This is the way a diss gets written - sometimes you pick at the edges rather than going straight at it. And, my diss advisor always said, in the end, it's just an insitutional document at this stage. It will become a book, but it doesn't need to be now...
MW: I've been thinking about checking references as diss work. Also anything that I have to read because it *might* have something to offer. I like it! I have to get away from the notion of "work" as file mass increase.
I'd really like them to brand my forehead with PhD now, but I guess that's how it is for all of us.
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