Procrastiblogging

Okay, so I'm in a coffeehouse (not Scary with Ginger and Gecko Coffeehouse), and I should be working but I am so, so tired. And so am blogging for energy. I blame the rainy weather (why?), though really it might be because I had a dream about the revolution last night and it wasn't pretty. I always thought I'd be on the revolutionary side! But it turns out that my family and I were being held as prisoners. We refused to give our names and had to figure out how to get food to eat. (I remember we nuked some spinach and cheese.) There were children and elderly people -- and my mom was getting really skinny and scared. When I woke up, I was a bit rattled -- so I called WSF and told him that the end of the world was at hand.

In real life, I've managed to revise Chapter 1 (and the crowd goes wild). It kind of sucks. I think I made it worse. There are now all these conceptual problems that I see with some of my ideas now that I'm close up enough to see the holes in my thinking. Damn Swiss cheese brain. Anyway, I turned it in and am now onto reconfiguring Chapter 2. That is, I'm procrastinating Chapter 2 -- partly because I'm tired and partly because I think I need to figure out how to get Chapter 2 to address the problems I now have in Chapter 1. Sigh.

SO is coming into town, poor man. Tomorrow is his birthday. Can I just say how much I am not in the mood to be the good girlfriend, a nice person, anything but the Hate-Filled Dissertator I am? I can now deal with only three people in town: Witty Sardonic Friend, Similarly Hate-Filled Dissertator and Blog Goddess Maude Lebowski, and Similarly Neurotic Cool Friend. Everyone else is suspect. And there's a party for people graduating, including someone who looked at me at one point and said: so, are you going to graduate on time? Well, actually, heartless rat, I'd like to answer, I'm not because I'm writing a traditional dissertation and the powers that be have seen fit to reduce the number of funded years for TAs. But I'm only taking the summer more, so there's no point in trying to make this point. Besides, I already told some department people that they need to rethink the time to graduation for people writing traditional dissertations -- and I heard from a colleague at the beginning of her program that they're talking about it in department meetings. Who knew? There might be a god.

But she has a sick sense of humor. (An absurdist, I knew it.) So it turns out that a person who hasn't been teaching has managed to get a big teaching award. I'm still puzzling that one out. In what kind of world does this make any kind of sense? And this person does tend to get every award. I can only imagine that as the department is trying to make a name for itself in a particular field, the powers that be see that this person has the capacity to be a posterchild/success story for the department. Hence the investment. (I know it sounds like sour grapes, but I don't think this colleague is all that. Not that I would get that award. Just that it doesn't make any sense to me.)

Anyway, while I was angrily drinking last night over this, today I just see this inexplicable phenomenon as evidence and motivation for me to get the hell out of here!!!!!

So I guess I better get on it.

***Update 6:04pm***

Okay, I think that's all I can do today. Peppy Advisor advocated reordering the chapter, so I sort of dumped the pieces in the new order into a document. I figure I'll print it out and make sure that I'm highlighting what I need to be highlighting. I do some good revising just on paper. (It's less intimidating!) I also did some freewriting on some questions and think I've come to a new understanding of what I'm trying to say in this chapter. I hope. Maybe. We'll see. I feel like I'm convincing myself of new things through the revision process. I hope that I'm not so deeply inside this work that these ideas are going to seem far-fetched. Sigh. Time to do laundry and pretend that I'm not nearly as disgusting as I, in fact, am. And hours to go before I sleep. Hours to go before I sleep.