Also, I think I'm about two days away from this:
Saturday, March 31, 2007
editorial note
due to an, um, incident, I have decided it's probably best to stop using people's names in my posts. I hope this doesn't cause too much mystification, or take away from the fascinating-ness of my narcissistic ramblings.
Also, I think I'm about two days away from this:
Also, I think I'm about two days away from this:
Friday, March 30, 2007
notes from underground
this may or may not come as a surprise to you, but I simply did not do any work this week. I last blogged on Monday, a day that was completely devoted to useless introspection and worrying about not doing any work. The maxim of the day was:
1. Write a crap thesis
2. Edit it
After blogging about it and washing some dishes, I called [GERTRUDE STEIN] and broke down, hysterically returning to "I'm a confused young child and I need my mother" mode. [GERTRUDE STEIN] is a professor with many misguided students of her own, but she was a little taken aback upon discovering that I have no "goal for the future." Oh well. We set up a meeting. I went out drinking in Nashua and saw some good live music.
On Tuesday I slept late, accosted [MARV ALBERT] and told him about my dilemma. He left me with the following:
Motivation does not cause production, production causes motivation.
Seemed like a good idea at the time. Then I had my meeting with [GERTRUDE STEIN], who assigned me a single task to be completed by the next day:
Make a list of things to do.
I made the list, divided the tasks into four categories of difficulty and time-consumption, and got ready to tell [JOSEPH STIGLITZ] that I had decided not to finish on time. He was, to say the least, not pleased. It was very awkward, I think he felt like has done all he can and failed. Of course, I'm the one who sucks, but I think deep down he knows that.
I went home, took a long scalding shower, went out drinking in Cambridge, and saw some good live music.
On Wednesday I slept late, and [GERTRUDE STEIN] stopped by my house to see my list of things to do. I showed it to her and we decided on some deadlines for things I should get done by our next meeting. She gave me some money and a foot-bath-thingy that she bought for my dead grandmother. Then I went up to Salem, dropped my vacuum cleaner off to be fixed, and went to the music store to see about my guitar. It would cost $150 to fix, a big expense considering I paid $25 for the guitar, so it's back to sandpaper and wood glue for me and my axe. The music store dude also tried to help me find a 4-track cassette deck with pitch control to slow down my interviews with, the cheapest used one was $180. I said to the dude,
I just don't have enough money to fix all of my problems in life.
When I got home I smoked a little [PLAIN OLD TOBACCO] and started rereading Notes From Underground. Let me tell you, there could not have been a worse time for me to get [PLAIN OLD TOBACCO] and read a narrative about inertia and alienation. The Underground Man said:
Oh, if I had done nothing simply from laziness! Heavens, how I should have respected myself, then. I should have respected myself because I should at least have been capable of being lazy; there would at least have been one quality, as it were, positive in me, in which I could have believed myself.
So yeah, that was depressing. On Thursday I woke up early and got a phone call from my friend [JUDY BLUME], whose anti-procrastination advice seems to have failed both of us. I went to school and picked up the readings for the conference paper, put them in my bag, and proceeded along with my time-wasting. I did some emailing, checked out some phrenology charts, and considered doing radical brain surgery on myself.
[DOSTOEVSKY HIMSELF] approached me and asked how things were going. I told him exactly how things were going... He said that in the 13 years it took him to write his dissertation, the best advice he ever got was accept his own unique writing process, as different and/or crazy as it might seem to others. He told me he has noticed that I get myself worked up so much before I even begin writing, and that certainly adds to the amount of time it takes me to produce. A lot of people think that's my 'problem' because they can just sit down and write something. He told me:
Getting overwhelmed is the first step of your process, always. But in a way, you MUST work yourself up, so don't beat yourself up over it. Recognize that you do get overwhelmed, that you will get overwhelmed, and accept it as a part of your writing process.
That was some of the most sensible advice I've gotten so far. Everyone tells me to stop 'being hard on myself,' but it seems much more useful to frame it as accepting something I do and working with myself, rather than fixing something I do (or don't do) and trying to change myself. I also tend to believe that I ought to be hard on myself, considering that myself is a person who does very little work. Anyhow, that made me feel better and gave me the energy I needed to get through the rest of the day.
I TA'ed my butt off for the hour or two left before class, sharing some sage-ish advice about the group projects, while simultaneously trying to do the reading that all the actual 'students' had finished days before. Whatever.
To make a long story short, my thesis is no closer to finished than it was two weeks ago. But I got a slew of [hopefully] good advice nuggets in my travels, I have a dozen new articles to read and a new paper to write, and I did a lot of yoga, drinking, and live-music-listening. Now I have to go make some lentil stew, lest I lose my not-writing-my-thesis momentum.
1. Write a crap thesis
2. Edit it
After blogging about it and washing some dishes, I called [GERTRUDE STEIN] and broke down, hysterically returning to "I'm a confused young child and I need my mother" mode. [GERTRUDE STEIN] is a professor with many misguided students of her own, but she was a little taken aback upon discovering that I have no "goal for the future." Oh well. We set up a meeting. I went out drinking in Nashua and saw some good live music.
On Tuesday I slept late, accosted [MARV ALBERT] and told him about my dilemma. He left me with the following:
Motivation does not cause production, production causes motivation.
Seemed like a good idea at the time. Then I had my meeting with [GERTRUDE STEIN], who assigned me a single task to be completed by the next day:
Make a list of things to do.
I made the list, divided the tasks into four categories of difficulty and time-consumption, and got ready to tell [JOSEPH STIGLITZ] that I had decided not to finish on time. He was, to say the least, not pleased. It was very awkward, I think he felt like has done all he can and failed. Of course, I'm the one who sucks, but I think deep down he knows that.
I went home, took a long scalding shower, went out drinking in Cambridge, and saw some good live music.
On Wednesday I slept late, and [GERTRUDE STEIN] stopped by my house to see my list of things to do. I showed it to her and we decided on some deadlines for things I should get done by our next meeting. She gave me some money and a foot-bath-thingy that she bought for my dead grandmother. Then I went up to Salem, dropped my vacuum cleaner off to be fixed, and went to the music store to see about my guitar. It would cost $150 to fix, a big expense considering I paid $25 for the guitar, so it's back to sandpaper and wood glue for me and my axe. The music store dude also tried to help me find a 4-track cassette deck with pitch control to slow down my interviews with, the cheapest used one was $180. I said to the dude,
I just don't have enough money to fix all of my problems in life.
When I got home I smoked a little [PLAIN OLD TOBACCO] and started rereading Notes From Underground. Let me tell you, there could not have been a worse time for me to get [PLAIN OLD TOBACCO] and read a narrative about inertia and alienation. The Underground Man said:
Oh, if I had done nothing simply from laziness! Heavens, how I should have respected myself, then. I should have respected myself because I should at least have been capable of being lazy; there would at least have been one quality, as it were, positive in me, in which I could have believed myself.
So yeah, that was depressing. On Thursday I woke up early and got a phone call from my friend [JUDY BLUME], whose anti-procrastination advice seems to have failed both of us. I went to school and picked up the readings for the conference paper, put them in my bag, and proceeded along with my time-wasting. I did some emailing, checked out some phrenology charts, and considered doing radical brain surgery on myself.
[DOSTOEVSKY HIMSELF] approached me and asked how things were going. I told him exactly how things were going... He said that in the 13 years it took him to write his dissertation, the best advice he ever got was accept his own unique writing process, as different and/or crazy as it might seem to others. He told me he has noticed that I get myself worked up so much before I even begin writing, and that certainly adds to the amount of time it takes me to produce. A lot of people think that's my 'problem' because they can just sit down and write something. He told me:
Getting overwhelmed is the first step of your process, always. But in a way, you MUST work yourself up, so don't beat yourself up over it. Recognize that you do get overwhelmed, that you will get overwhelmed, and accept it as a part of your writing process.
That was some of the most sensible advice I've gotten so far. Everyone tells me to stop 'being hard on myself,' but it seems much more useful to frame it as accepting something I do and working with myself, rather than fixing something I do (or don't do) and trying to change myself. I also tend to believe that I ought to be hard on myself, considering that myself is a person who does very little work. Anyhow, that made me feel better and gave me the energy I needed to get through the rest of the day.
I TA'ed my butt off for the hour or two left before class, sharing some sage-ish advice about the group projects, while simultaneously trying to do the reading that all the actual 'students' had finished days before. Whatever.
To make a long story short, my thesis is no closer to finished than it was two weeks ago. But I got a slew of [hopefully] good advice nuggets in my travels, I have a dozen new articles to read and a new paper to write, and I did a lot of yoga, drinking, and live-music-listening. Now I have to go make some lentil stew, lest I lose my not-writing-my-thesis momentum.
Monday, March 26, 2007
deterioration and reframing of the plan
I hadn't had an e-crisis in days, then this morning I woke up from a thesis nightmare of epic proportions. I've been pretty much bipolar all day, vacillating between ridiculously happy and relieved and ridiculously depressed and hopeless as I seriously consider, for the first time, the fact that I probably won't finish on time to graduate in June, but more importantly, that I can consciously decide not to. April 19th, the day when master's theses are supposed to be submitted to the library, is paralyzing the crap out of me - I have the power to change that, but the repercussions could be very damaging.
If all I had to do was write my thesis, April 19th might not be so scary. I could make myself just sit down and write for the next 22 days and end up with something - it wouldn't be as good as I want it to be, but it would be done and I could get on with my life. Unfortunately, I have a few other obligations hanging over my head: my RA, my TA, a paper I'm supposed to be helping to write and present at a conference, and a looong-overdue project from the fall. While my boss/chair has given me permission to pretty much slack off on everything except the TAing, I can't help but feel guilty that I'm still getting my exorbitant (ha) RA paycheck and not doing much.
Soooo, I had a crazy thought this morning... What if I just decided to be honest with myself and admit that this isn't going to happen? I could concentrate on the other stuff, feel good about actually getting something, anything done, and write my thesis over the summer. I'd have to justify my reasoning to a lot of people, and feel like I'm disappointing my parents and professors (whether or not it's true).
Would it be the end of the world? No, but I hestitate to give myself permission for something like that, because I'm notorious (in my own mind) for giving myself an inch and taking a mile. I know that if I make the decision to extend my deadline, I'll be taking one more step towards the precipice that is never finishing. Summer could easily turn into fall and then winter, etc., and the next thing you know I'll be 40 and still trying to finish my thesis. It's going to be especially dangerous if I get a job.
I just want to do a good job on this thesis though, I care so much about the topic that I couldn't fathom handing in something I'm not at least 75% proud of. I know I have to let go of some things, I know it's never going to be as perfect as I'd like, but I just can't help thinking that a few extra weeks would change everything.
It's probably nuts to think that, and I'll probably end up getting talked out of all this by the end of tomorrow. A part of me wants to get talked out of it, to be encouraged and told, even if it's a lie, that I can and will finish by the 19th. The other part of me wants to be told what I really want to hear, that everything will be fine if I take some extra time and concentrate on other stuff for a while. I guess either way, I just want someone to tell me that everything's going to be OK, and I want it to be true.
I've been running this seemingly lose-lose situation by various people today, basically looking for reassurance, because to be honest, I'm a very confused emotional weakling right now. A girl at school told me "No one will be disappointed in you" if I don't finish on time. It might not sound like much, but I was unbelievably touched by that, and if there hadn't been so many other people around I would have let myself burst into tears.
The only thing that gave me hope was a nugget of wisdom from a friend who has proved to be the most unfailing moral compass I know (and I seek advice, shall we say, pathologically). He has talked me through many an ethical dilemma, from what to eat to how to frame my thesis, and talked me down from many a ledge, whether he believes it or not. I will now stop being wishy-washy. Anyhow, I told him about all of this and as always, he had some good advice. I wrote it down:
Things to do:
The issue, I guess, is not whether I have a finished thesis by April 19th, but whether I commit myself to finishing at all. In my head I am committed, but without some actual product to back it up, mental committent will not be enough. The actual product doesn't have to be perfect or polished or even a whole chapter, but I realize I have to produce something. I've definitely decided to produce things before, with varying degrees of success, but I think, and sincerely hope, that this Crap Thesis idea might be concrete enough to work.
So I'm off to do, um, that. If I can get out of this funk, everyone will benefit. I'll have a better outlook on life and everyone else will get a break from reading this solipsistic crap I keep writing.
If all I had to do was write my thesis, April 19th might not be so scary. I could make myself just sit down and write for the next 22 days and end up with something - it wouldn't be as good as I want it to be, but it would be done and I could get on with my life. Unfortunately, I have a few other obligations hanging over my head: my RA, my TA, a paper I'm supposed to be helping to write and present at a conference, and a looong-overdue project from the fall. While my boss/chair has given me permission to pretty much slack off on everything except the TAing, I can't help but feel guilty that I'm still getting my exorbitant (ha) RA paycheck and not doing much.
Soooo, I had a crazy thought this morning... What if I just decided to be honest with myself and admit that this isn't going to happen? I could concentrate on the other stuff, feel good about actually getting something, anything done, and write my thesis over the summer. I'd have to justify my reasoning to a lot of people, and feel like I'm disappointing my parents and professors (whether or not it's true).
Would it be the end of the world? No, but I hestitate to give myself permission for something like that, because I'm notorious (in my own mind) for giving myself an inch and taking a mile. I know that if I make the decision to extend my deadline, I'll be taking one more step towards the precipice that is never finishing. Summer could easily turn into fall and then winter, etc., and the next thing you know I'll be 40 and still trying to finish my thesis. It's going to be especially dangerous if I get a job.
I just want to do a good job on this thesis though, I care so much about the topic that I couldn't fathom handing in something I'm not at least 75% proud of. I know I have to let go of some things, I know it's never going to be as perfect as I'd like, but I just can't help thinking that a few extra weeks would change everything.
It's probably nuts to think that, and I'll probably end up getting talked out of all this by the end of tomorrow. A part of me wants to get talked out of it, to be encouraged and told, even if it's a lie, that I can and will finish by the 19th. The other part of me wants to be told what I really want to hear, that everything will be fine if I take some extra time and concentrate on other stuff for a while. I guess either way, I just want someone to tell me that everything's going to be OK, and I want it to be true.
I've been running this seemingly lose-lose situation by various people today, basically looking for reassurance, because to be honest, I'm a very confused emotional weakling right now. A girl at school told me "No one will be disappointed in you" if I don't finish on time. It might not sound like much, but I was unbelievably touched by that, and if there hadn't been so many other people around I would have let myself burst into tears.
The only thing that gave me hope was a nugget of wisdom from a friend who has proved to be the most unfailing moral compass I know (and I seek advice, shall we say, pathologically). He has talked me through many an ethical dilemma, from what to eat to how to frame my thesis, and talked me down from many a ledge, whether he believes it or not. I will now stop being wishy-washy. Anyhow, I told him about all of this and as always, he had some good advice. I wrote it down:
Things to do:
- Write a crap thesis
- Edit it
The issue, I guess, is not whether I have a finished thesis by April 19th, but whether I commit myself to finishing at all. In my head I am committed, but without some actual product to back it up, mental committent will not be enough. The actual product doesn't have to be perfect or polished or even a whole chapter, but I realize I have to produce something. I've definitely decided to produce things before, with varying degrees of success, but I think, and sincerely hope, that this Crap Thesis idea might be concrete enough to work.
So I'm off to do, um, that. If I can get out of this funk, everyone will benefit. I'll have a better outlook on life and everyone else will get a break from reading this solipsistic crap I keep writing.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
ode to roo roo, transcription goddess
roo roo is, among many other awesome things, a transcribing machine. This girl is a trooper, a saint, and a research assistant all in one. Jack Dougherty was a fool to let her go - if I were him I would have messed with her transcript so she couldn't graduate, that way she'd be stuck at Trinity for a few more years of dedicated service. Not many people can say they have a friend who'd be willing to give up a perfectly good Friday and Saturday afternoon to do them a favor - especially when the favor involves being glued to a computer transcribing a seemingly endless series of "ums," "likes," and "you knows" interspersed with the occasional money quote about green cleaning. Her transcribing enabled me to feel like I was "working on my thesis," while in reality I was messing around with my vacuum cleaner, blowing up a balance ball, chatting on the phone with my mom, and generally puttering around the house.
Yeah, and then at the end of it all, I sent Amanda home with a transcribing machine and another tape, just in case she feels the urge to spend any more of her free time facilitating my thesis. How can I resist? Her spelling and grammar are impeccable, she knows how to type with all her fingers. Really, it would be futile for me to transcribe the interviews myself when she's clearly so much better at it. This is what Kant was talking about, right?
the plan: update
a paper tacked to my bulletin board says the following:
Week of March 18
Week of March 18
- NO CLEANING
- NO POINTLESS EMAILS
- NO UNNECESSARY PHONE CALLS
- NO RESD
- NO SOCIALIZING
- NO COOKING
- NO PROCRASTINATING
Friday, March 23, 2007
most of the time, it's nice to get home a little tipsy and find delicious homemade foods like beef stew, or even to get home tipsy and make a delicious omelette. you feel all healthy and sustainable and it almost assuages the guilt associated with "Jim Beam on a school night." But then other times, it's nice to get home a little tipsy and ignore the beef stew, ignore the plentiful organic produce, and eat Spaghettios with hot dogs.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
the plan
a few days ago I caught up with my friend Kelly from college; she had a baby a few months ago and I've been so bad at keeping in touch with her lately. She lives kind of far away, in exotic Deluxbury, and it's tough for us to see each other since she had the baby (which doesn't explain why I can't seem to find time to talk to her on the phone, but anyways...)
Sometimes I feel like we have less in common since she's "settled down," she's got lots of adult things to deal with while my life is unfettered by marriage, homeowning, baby-raising, etc. Besides the occasional pang of guilt for being incredibly irresponsible and short-sighted most of the time, I'm pretty much happy with that - I just really really wish I could procrastinate less.
I was complaining to Kelly about my time-wasting habit, which used to be something we had in common. In college we both wound up with majors that required us to produce mass quantities of writing every week, which is pretty much kryptonite to severe procrastinators. The two of us seemed to constantly be one-upping each other in that department: if one of us said "I've got a 30-page paper to write, I haven't even started it, and it's already two days late," the other would come back with somthing like "yeah, well I've got a 40-page paper to write, I haven't even started it or done the reading, it's already three days late, and I haven't slept in 72 hours." And unfortunately, it would be true. We were consistently behind, asking for extensions after papers were already late, never able to catch up. We never did our reading and we were always stressed out, pulling all-nighters and writing exclusively in long, cracked-out jags. When we graduated, and it was a miracle that we did, I was pretty sure I never wanted to write another word.
Proving that the gods are indeed crazy, Kelly and I both wound up writing for a living, more or less. The other day on the phone when we started to commiserate about the evil that is The Deadline, I told Kelly how hopeless I felt about my whole thesis problem, how I was pretty sure I'd never figure out how to "get work done" like normal people. Then she dropped a bomb on me, telling me that she had quit procrastinating and had the solution. I was shocked to hear that my former partner in crimes of laziness had quit - it was like a knife to my heart to feel like I was now officially the only one with this, um, malaise?
Apparently Kelly's epiphany came when a coworker told her something very simple like "worry today doesn't solve work tomorrow," which somehow snapped her out of her decade-long procrastination funk. She didn't really elaborate on her exact strategy for quitting, but the fact that she did it, if only for a week so far, gave me a lot of hope for my own situation. More importantly, it made me realize that just how much the 'worrying' can hold me hostage - the dread of the blank page, the paralyzing fear of never finishing...
When I got off the phone with Kelly I felt ready to get all serious about work...and then I checked my email. Out of, say, twenty emails, five were spam and fifteen were completely pointless. Emails from people I talk to or see almost every day, useless communications that someone decided to CC me on, ridiculous forwards about guardian angels. Normally I would read each of these emails and reply to the majority of them, even though it would actually be faster to get in the car, drive to school or wherever, see these people in person, have a five-minute conversation and be done with it. So I decided to delete all of my non-essential emails, and it was so f-ing liberating. I can't believe it never occurred to me before, how much of my time I waste emailing, how much of other people's time I waste, and how much they waste my time.
I had a similar revelation a few weeks ago regarding my cell phone, and pretty much stopped picking up the phone altogether unless I knew exactly why the person was calling and really wanted to talk to them. That was really liberating too, but poorly executed. A normal person not picking up the phone is probably screening their calls and listening to the voicemails later on. Once I accumulated four or five messages, however, it just seemed too daunting to even listen to them, so I didn't...for like two weeks. As it turns out I missed out on some pretty important stuff, not to mention the fact that everyone started to hate me. People kept asking if I was avoiding them, and I was a little embarassed - but you can't just tell someone they're not worth your time, even if it's totally true. I'm addicted to human interaction in all its forms, but it's something I just have to lay off if I'm ever going to graduate.
Anyhow, the point of all of this is that I am going to take advantage of all these lessons I've learned recently and I'm putting them together in a new plan to quit procrastinating. This is a two-pronged approach, combining two strategies I've tried before to no avail: getting over the fear and living under a rock. I know from many past experiences that neither of these works for me on its own, but I'm hoping that together they'll create some kind of wondrously fruitful chemical reaction in my brain. So this week, my mantra is "over fear, under rock," and I plan to repeat it ad nauseum whenever I feel the urge to procrastinate.
On that note, I've been writing this post for a while now and I'm sure I could find a better use of my time. I'm not saying I will, but I could... I'll probably just go to sleep, I'm exhausted from a long day of green cleaning and talking to people, two things I'm not allowing myself to do for the next four days. I'm off to the little Walden Pond that exists only in my mind, where I plan to be very hermit-like, very self-absorbed, and very productive this week. So if you call me and I don't pick up the phone, rest assured, it's not you, it's me.
Sometimes I feel like we have less in common since she's "settled down," she's got lots of adult things to deal with while my life is unfettered by marriage, homeowning, baby-raising, etc. Besides the occasional pang of guilt for being incredibly irresponsible and short-sighted most of the time, I'm pretty much happy with that - I just really really wish I could procrastinate less.
I was complaining to Kelly about my time-wasting habit, which used to be something we had in common. In college we both wound up with majors that required us to produce mass quantities of writing every week, which is pretty much kryptonite to severe procrastinators. The two of us seemed to constantly be one-upping each other in that department: if one of us said "I've got a 30-page paper to write, I haven't even started it, and it's already two days late," the other would come back with somthing like "yeah, well I've got a 40-page paper to write, I haven't even started it or done the reading, it's already three days late, and I haven't slept in 72 hours." And unfortunately, it would be true. We were consistently behind, asking for extensions after papers were already late, never able to catch up. We never did our reading and we were always stressed out, pulling all-nighters and writing exclusively in long, cracked-out jags. When we graduated, and it was a miracle that we did, I was pretty sure I never wanted to write another word.
Proving that the gods are indeed crazy, Kelly and I both wound up writing for a living, more or less. The other day on the phone when we started to commiserate about the evil that is The Deadline, I told Kelly how hopeless I felt about my whole thesis problem, how I was pretty sure I'd never figure out how to "get work done" like normal people. Then she dropped a bomb on me, telling me that she had quit procrastinating and had the solution. I was shocked to hear that my former partner in crimes of laziness had quit - it was like a knife to my heart to feel like I was now officially the only one with this, um, malaise?
Apparently Kelly's epiphany came when a coworker told her something very simple like "worry today doesn't solve work tomorrow," which somehow snapped her out of her decade-long procrastination funk. She didn't really elaborate on her exact strategy for quitting, but the fact that she did it, if only for a week so far, gave me a lot of hope for my own situation. More importantly, it made me realize that just how much the 'worrying' can hold me hostage - the dread of the blank page, the paralyzing fear of never finishing...
When I got off the phone with Kelly I felt ready to get all serious about work...and then I checked my email. Out of, say, twenty emails, five were spam and fifteen were completely pointless. Emails from people I talk to or see almost every day, useless communications that someone decided to CC me on, ridiculous forwards about guardian angels. Normally I would read each of these emails and reply to the majority of them, even though it would actually be faster to get in the car, drive to school or wherever, see these people in person, have a five-minute conversation and be done with it. So I decided to delete all of my non-essential emails, and it was so f-ing liberating. I can't believe it never occurred to me before, how much of my time I waste emailing, how much of other people's time I waste, and how much they waste my time.
I had a similar revelation a few weeks ago regarding my cell phone, and pretty much stopped picking up the phone altogether unless I knew exactly why the person was calling and really wanted to talk to them. That was really liberating too, but poorly executed. A normal person not picking up the phone is probably screening their calls and listening to the voicemails later on. Once I accumulated four or five messages, however, it just seemed too daunting to even listen to them, so I didn't...for like two weeks. As it turns out I missed out on some pretty important stuff, not to mention the fact that everyone started to hate me. People kept asking if I was avoiding them, and I was a little embarassed - but you can't just tell someone they're not worth your time, even if it's totally true. I'm addicted to human interaction in all its forms, but it's something I just have to lay off if I'm ever going to graduate.
Anyhow, the point of all of this is that I am going to take advantage of all these lessons I've learned recently and I'm putting them together in a new plan to quit procrastinating. This is a two-pronged approach, combining two strategies I've tried before to no avail: getting over the fear and living under a rock. I know from many past experiences that neither of these works for me on its own, but I'm hoping that together they'll create some kind of wondrously fruitful chemical reaction in my brain. So this week, my mantra is "over fear, under rock," and I plan to repeat it ad nauseum whenever I feel the urge to procrastinate.
On that note, I've been writing this post for a while now and I'm sure I could find a better use of my time. I'm not saying I will, but I could... I'll probably just go to sleep, I'm exhausted from a long day of green cleaning and talking to people, two things I'm not allowing myself to do for the next four days. I'm off to the little Walden Pond that exists only in my mind, where I plan to be very hermit-like, very self-absorbed, and very productive this week. So if you call me and I don't pick up the phone, rest assured, it's not you, it's me.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
this week in homemade food
A quick note while I wait for the floor to dry... I did a lot of cooking this past week, starting with a beef stew extravaganza on Monday. I had some potatoes that were growing a few too many eyes, some carrots unfit for raw consumption, and three onions I bought when Homero moved in (that would be January). The weather was cold and blustery, and my fireplace, well, it doesn't exist. The moment, it seemed, was right for me to get my beef stew on for the first time this winter.
So I called my mom to demand her beef stew recipe, which is basic but amazing, and went down to Tha Sto to get some nice marbly stew meat. She said a pound of meat, but it just didn't look like it would be enough meat to satisfy my needs, so I got three. Then I had to compensate for what turned out to be waaaay too much meat by putting in a whole bitchload of other stuff, an ended up with too much stew.
You may be asking yourself, "can you ever have too much beef stew?" the answer, weirdly enough, is YES. 16 quarts of beef stew is officially TOO MUCH BEEF STEW. Please come over and eat some, I am so sick of beef stew and so is everyone else who has happened to walk into my house over the past few days. I live across the street from callery park and my door is always open to the tired, the cold, and those yearning to break free from beef stewlessness. Anyhow, for those of you who can't come over, or refuse to come over because "oh, I couldn't possibly drive to Lowell, that's in a different county!" I say, you're a pussy, but here's the recipe anyways. It's based only loosely on my mom's, and while it doesn't quite capture her mastery of all things stew, it's pretty f-ing delicious. I have more-or-less halved the amounts I actually used, so this will make about 8 quarts of delicious beef stew:
mix together some flour, salt and cracked pepper in a bowl. Put some stew beef in the bowl (like at least 2lbs) and mix it up till the beef is all covered in flour. Heat oil in your stockpot and add two chopped onions and at least two big spoonfuls of chopped garlic, sautee them for a minute or two then throw in the beef and brown it. there will be nasty stuff sticking to the bottom of the pot - don't worry, that's the 'flava.'
add 6 cups of liquid (some combination of wine, water, beer, worcestershire, hot sauce, and/or beef stock). I usually use however much wine I have in an open bottle, however much beef stock comes in those cartons, a few good tablespoons of Worcestershire and hot sauce, the open beer I may be drinking at the time, and the rest water. Bring it to a boil, stirring it occasionally to keep the beef chunks from sticking to the bottom of the pot. Reduce the heat, add two bay leaves, and simmer for at least an hour.
Add 4 big carrots, chopped, and simmer 20 minutes more. Add a bunch of chopped potatoes (like 5 medium or 3 large), 4 stalks of chopped celery, half a chopped rutabaga (way better than a turnip), some mushrooms/peas/green beans/whatever else is lying around, and, very important, one serrano pepper, seeded and diced up very fine. Simmer all that about 30 minutes more, or until the potatoes are nice and tender. Adjust the seasonings, salt, pepper, hot sauce, etc. and remove the bay leaves.
Turn off the heat and eat a bowl of stew to gauge the stew's thickness after cooling. It usually comes out perfectly thick, but anything can happen. if it is too thin for your taste, make a roux: heat (on medium) 4 tbsp of butter and add 6 tbsp flour, whisking constantly until it bubbles, then reduce the heat and whisk for a minute or two more. Add the roux to the stew and bring it back to a boil, continue to cook it for about 20-30 minutes. Don't thicken it with cornstarch, plain flour, or forget to cook it after adding the roux - the stew will taste like nasty raw flour.
Note: it's also easy to make this in a crockpot, just throw everything in together and crock it on low for at least 5 or 6 hours. If you're not much of a "solid chunks of beef" purist, there's really no upper limit - I once left it crocking for about 16 hours and it was perfectly delightful. If you do crock it, you should still brown the beef first with the onions and garlic.
During the snowstorm on Friday, Craig and Lydia came over to help me eat my beef stew and bake up some delicious apple spice cake, which I brought to Laurie's delicious boiled dinner. This cake is one of my favorite ways to use up mushy apples, and it looks so pretty, especially if you drizzle a little glaze on top (confectioner's sugar mixed with some OJ or water).
preheat the oven to 350 and butter (really lay it on thick unless you have a nonstick pan, trust me) and flour a bundt pan or tube pan. with a fork or a mixer, mash together two sticks of butter with 2 teaspoons of vanilla, 1 1/2 cups of brown sugar and enough maple syrup or molasses to make it easier to blend. The goal is to have a total of almost 2 cups of sugar-related ingredients, I usually mix it up according to what I have and getting the consistency I want (smooth but pasty, not liquidy, is the goal). then mix in 3 eggs, one at at time.
in another bowl put 3 cups of flour (white, wheat and pastry all work fine), a big teaspoon of salt, a half teaspoon of baking soda, and some cinnamon, nutmeg, and whatever other spices you like. I usually do like a teaspoon each of those and then half a teaspoon of cloves, sometimes a little allspice or fenugreek. The "actual recipe" calls for 1/8 tsp of mace, which I never have around, and one teaspoon of cinnamon (no nutmeg or cloves - but they're so delicious!) sift the dry ingredients together and add to the wet ingredients.
on the subject of the "actual recipe," when I finally located it I was surprised to find that it calls for 1 1/2 teaspoons of baking POWDER, but I swear to god I've always made it with 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda. I have no idea how I got it into my head to make it that way, but I've made this cake literally dozens of times and it always comes out pretty good. maybe I'll try it the other way next time and see what happens.
Locate a friend or someone who owes you a favor, and have them peel, core, and slice a bunch of apples. I've figured out that the amount of apples is totally irrelevant. I've used anywhere from two to six apples and it comes out fine no matter what, as long as you cut them up uniformly (sliced pretty small). I usually use cortland and/or macintosh apples, once I used granny smith and wasn't crazy about it because they don't get soft enough, even though the apples I used were way too soft to eat. Anyhoo, mix in your apples and at least a cup of nuts (I lean towards two cups because I really like nuts). I usually use walnuts, but this last time I didn't have enough so I used some pecans.
make sure everything's all mixed up well (you will probably have to use your hands to squish it up thoroughly if you use a lot of apples) and put it into the pan, bake it for an hour or so (it's done when you press on the middle and it feels only slightly mushier than the outside - or just use a toothpick, whatever). Let it cool for a few minutes before turning it onto a plate, and voila, delicious apple cake! let me know how it goes.
So I called my mom to demand her beef stew recipe, which is basic but amazing, and went down to Tha Sto to get some nice marbly stew meat. She said a pound of meat, but it just didn't look like it would be enough meat to satisfy my needs, so I got three. Then I had to compensate for what turned out to be waaaay too much meat by putting in a whole bitchload of other stuff, an ended up with too much stew.
You may be asking yourself, "can you ever have too much beef stew?" the answer, weirdly enough, is YES. 16 quarts of beef stew is officially TOO MUCH BEEF STEW. Please come over and eat some, I am so sick of beef stew and so is everyone else who has happened to walk into my house over the past few days. I live across the street from callery park and my door is always open to the tired, the cold, and those yearning to break free from beef stewlessness. Anyhow, for those of you who can't come over, or refuse to come over because "oh, I couldn't possibly drive to Lowell, that's in a different county!" I say, you're a pussy, but here's the recipe anyways. It's based only loosely on my mom's, and while it doesn't quite capture her mastery of all things stew, it's pretty f-ing delicious. I have more-or-less halved the amounts I actually used, so this will make about 8 quarts of delicious beef stew:
mix together some flour, salt and cracked pepper in a bowl. Put some stew beef in the bowl (like at least 2lbs) and mix it up till the beef is all covered in flour. Heat oil in your stockpot and add two chopped onions and at least two big spoonfuls of chopped garlic, sautee them for a minute or two then throw in the beef and brown it. there will be nasty stuff sticking to the bottom of the pot - don't worry, that's the 'flava.'
add 6 cups of liquid (some combination of wine, water, beer, worcestershire, hot sauce, and/or beef stock). I usually use however much wine I have in an open bottle, however much beef stock comes in those cartons, a few good tablespoons of Worcestershire and hot sauce, the open beer I may be drinking at the time, and the rest water. Bring it to a boil, stirring it occasionally to keep the beef chunks from sticking to the bottom of the pot. Reduce the heat, add two bay leaves, and simmer for at least an hour.
Add 4 big carrots, chopped, and simmer 20 minutes more. Add a bunch of chopped potatoes (like 5 medium or 3 large), 4 stalks of chopped celery, half a chopped rutabaga (way better than a turnip), some mushrooms/peas/green beans/whatever else is lying around, and, very important, one serrano pepper, seeded and diced up very fine. Simmer all that about 30 minutes more, or until the potatoes are nice and tender. Adjust the seasonings, salt, pepper, hot sauce, etc. and remove the bay leaves.
Turn off the heat and eat a bowl of stew to gauge the stew's thickness after cooling. It usually comes out perfectly thick, but anything can happen. if it is too thin for your taste, make a roux: heat (on medium) 4 tbsp of butter and add 6 tbsp flour, whisking constantly until it bubbles, then reduce the heat and whisk for a minute or two more. Add the roux to the stew and bring it back to a boil, continue to cook it for about 20-30 minutes. Don't thicken it with cornstarch, plain flour, or forget to cook it after adding the roux - the stew will taste like nasty raw flour.
Note: it's also easy to make this in a crockpot, just throw everything in together and crock it on low for at least 5 or 6 hours. If you're not much of a "solid chunks of beef" purist, there's really no upper limit - I once left it crocking for about 16 hours and it was perfectly delightful. If you do crock it, you should still brown the beef first with the onions and garlic.
During the snowstorm on Friday, Craig and Lydia came over to help me eat my beef stew and bake up some delicious apple spice cake, which I brought to Laurie's delicious boiled dinner. This cake is one of my favorite ways to use up mushy apples, and it looks so pretty, especially if you drizzle a little glaze on top (confectioner's sugar mixed with some OJ or water).
preheat the oven to 350 and butter (really lay it on thick unless you have a nonstick pan, trust me) and flour a bundt pan or tube pan. with a fork or a mixer, mash together two sticks of butter with 2 teaspoons of vanilla, 1 1/2 cups of brown sugar and enough maple syrup or molasses to make it easier to blend. The goal is to have a total of almost 2 cups of sugar-related ingredients, I usually mix it up according to what I have and getting the consistency I want (smooth but pasty, not liquidy, is the goal). then mix in 3 eggs, one at at time.
in another bowl put 3 cups of flour (white, wheat and pastry all work fine), a big teaspoon of salt, a half teaspoon of baking soda, and some cinnamon, nutmeg, and whatever other spices you like. I usually do like a teaspoon each of those and then half a teaspoon of cloves, sometimes a little allspice or fenugreek. The "actual recipe" calls for 1/8 tsp of mace, which I never have around, and one teaspoon of cinnamon (no nutmeg or cloves - but they're so delicious!) sift the dry ingredients together and add to the wet ingredients.
on the subject of the "actual recipe," when I finally located it I was surprised to find that it calls for 1 1/2 teaspoons of baking POWDER, but I swear to god I've always made it with 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda. I have no idea how I got it into my head to make it that way, but I've made this cake literally dozens of times and it always comes out pretty good. maybe I'll try it the other way next time and see what happens.
Locate a friend or someone who owes you a favor, and have them peel, core, and slice a bunch of apples. I've figured out that the amount of apples is totally irrelevant. I've used anywhere from two to six apples and it comes out fine no matter what, as long as you cut them up uniformly (sliced pretty small). I usually use cortland and/or macintosh apples, once I used granny smith and wasn't crazy about it because they don't get soft enough, even though the apples I used were way too soft to eat. Anyhoo, mix in your apples and at least a cup of nuts (I lean towards two cups because I really like nuts). I usually use walnuts, but this last time I didn't have enough so I used some pecans.
make sure everything's all mixed up well (you will probably have to use your hands to squish it up thoroughly if you use a lot of apples) and put it into the pan, bake it for an hour or so (it's done when you press on the middle and it feels only slightly mushier than the outside - or just use a toothpick, whatever). Let it cool for a few minutes before turning it onto a plate, and voila, delicious apple cake! let me know how it goes.
Saturday, March 10, 2007
ode
you may recall that while I was working on my thesis proposal in the fall, I procrastinated for a few hours one night by blogging a lengthy list of songs that I've adopted as anthems of school-related stress. if you don't recall (and honestly, why would you?) and don't feel like procrastinating yourself/reading that whole thing, here's a summary:
5. Hallelujah (Leonard Cohen): thesis proposal
4. Only Living Boy in New York (Simon and Garfunkel): quantitative research methods
3. Wooden Ships (CSNY): "What is Psychedelia?" paper
2. Trouble (Ray LaMontagne): Honduras Incident
1. Naive Melody (Talking Heads): undergrad thesis
I've been sitting here for hours working on a stupid f-ing column about stupid f-ing community university partnerships for a really stupid f-ing newspaper. today was a beautiful day and there were certainly more fun things I could have been doing. Craig and Lydia went hiking, Roo Roo et al went to a St. Patrick's Day festival at the Harpoon brewery, but I'm not bitter. much.
But I digress. I've been listening to The Arcade Fire a bit obsessively lately, in the car, in the house, at school. I've even found myself wearing my iPod while I wander around aimlessly from place to place, which I something I never do (let me clarify: I almost never listen to my iPod while wandering, but I wander all the time. I also enjoy puttering, meandering, idling, lazing, and putzing.) This one song "Wake Up" has been really speaking to me during my most recent existential crises. A few choice lines:
someone told me not to cry
but now that I'm older
and my heart's colder
I can see that it's a lie.
children wake up
hold your mistake up
good stuff, I think this song is well on its way to acheiving a top spot in the list of songs of painful significance. I don't know if it will stand the test of time and become my master's thesis song... There's a lot of time left until it's due, and surely a lot of new and painful experiences that will happen between now and then, a lot of new songs that could potentially overtake this one. so I don't really know what they "meant" to say in this song, but I've been assigning it my own meaning, as I like to do, in order to assign meaning to my own existence, whose meaning I'm always doubting. I have now said the word "meaning" so many times that it's beginning to lose its, uh, meaning.
again, I digress. so I'm currently working on holding my own mistakes up, as in recognizing them and trying to learn from them. For example, should I be writing this right now, or should I be transcribing interviews? Past experiences would indicate that I'll be a lot happier tomorrow if I can go to the beach and wiggle my toes around in the sand. However, if I continue blogging and not working, I'll be forced to spend tomorrow wiggling my toes around in my slippers while I do schoolwork at home and look out the window, all bitter like I am now. So I have held my past mistakes up, and now I'm holding my current mistake up and recognizing that I totally suck? and doing something about it?
I wish it were that simple, but I think there's some other variable beyond holding up my mistakes. I know pretty much exactly what they are, and exactly how to act so I don't repeat the same mistakes over and over, but something is missing. It's not that I don't have the motivation to do anything, because there are certain things I can finish right away. But when it comes to the things that are most important to my future happiness, like finishing my thesis on time to graduate, I'll find any distraction to avoid it.
In college I had a very similar issue with my undergrad thesis. It got to the point where I went to see the school psychologist, who theorized that I couldn't seem to finish, or really even start, my thesis because I didn't "really want to graduate." I liked my life in college so much that I was subconsciously trying to prolong it, not understanding that in the end it was a self-destuctive plan. That explanation would have seemed pretty sensible, had he not followed it up with the recommendation that I get laid more often. F-ing creep.
In the end, I didn't get laid, but I did finish my thesis. And it SUCKED. ASS. I shudder to think that it's printed and bound, available to any human being who walks into the Trinity library. I thank the Lord every day that I wrote it in Spanish, thus reducing the number of people that would be able to read it if they tried. While I only spent a few months really invested in that thesis, however, I've been obsessed with my master's thesis topic for well over a year now, and up until now, it's the biggest and most important project I've undertaken on any topic.
Beyond the time I've already invested in researching, talking about, and practicing green cleaning, it's something that I'm fairly certain I could devote the rest of my life to. This is going to sound extraordinarily lame, but I care about green cleaning too much to let my first published writing about it to be crap. Yes, I actually think that my weird-ass love for green cleaning is what's holding me back. I'm reminded of an awesome but little-known Talking Heads song called "Sax and Violins" (yes, they could have made the title's allusion a little less flagrant, but whatever, they're the Talking Heads and they don't subscribe to 'subtle'. Plus, there really is a saxophone playing in the song. Kind of. Anyways...)
wooden heads
furniture with legs
for sale
love keeps us together
love will drive us insane
So yeah, the jist of it is that I love green cleaning too much to ever let it go, to ever 'finish' writing about it. And this love is, as it were, driving me insane. The funny thing is, there are people in my program with the exact opposite problem: they are so disillusioned with their topic that they also find themselves unable to finish writing, whether because they think the topic is a problem with no solution or because they have come to think it's something that just doesn't matter.
While I'm certainly disillusioned with the process, with having to write and prove myself and all that, and I'm certainly not getting anywhere by writing about it instead of writing about IT, the essence of my problem is that I'm too obsessed with my thesis and too optimistic about my topic, not too indifferent. In the end, while it might be self-destructive or psychotic or just plain weird, I think I'd much rather keep it that way.
5. Hallelujah (Leonard Cohen): thesis proposal
4. Only Living Boy in New York (Simon and Garfunkel): quantitative research methods
3. Wooden Ships (CSNY): "What is Psychedelia?" paper
2. Trouble (Ray LaMontagne): Honduras Incident
1. Naive Melody (Talking Heads): undergrad thesis
I've been sitting here for hours working on a stupid f-ing column about stupid f-ing community university partnerships for a really stupid f-ing newspaper. today was a beautiful day and there were certainly more fun things I could have been doing. Craig and Lydia went hiking, Roo Roo et al went to a St. Patrick's Day festival at the Harpoon brewery, but I'm not bitter. much.
But I digress. I've been listening to The Arcade Fire a bit obsessively lately, in the car, in the house, at school. I've even found myself wearing my iPod while I wander around aimlessly from place to place, which I something I never do (let me clarify: I almost never listen to my iPod while wandering, but I wander all the time. I also enjoy puttering, meandering, idling, lazing, and putzing.) This one song "Wake Up" has been really speaking to me during my most recent existential crises. A few choice lines:
someone told me not to cry
but now that I'm older
and my heart's colder
I can see that it's a lie.
children wake up
hold your mistake up
good stuff, I think this song is well on its way to acheiving a top spot in the list of songs of painful significance. I don't know if it will stand the test of time and become my master's thesis song... There's a lot of time left until it's due, and surely a lot of new and painful experiences that will happen between now and then, a lot of new songs that could potentially overtake this one. so I don't really know what they "meant" to say in this song, but I've been assigning it my own meaning, as I like to do, in order to assign meaning to my own existence, whose meaning I'm always doubting. I have now said the word "meaning" so many times that it's beginning to lose its, uh, meaning.
again, I digress. so I'm currently working on holding my own mistakes up, as in recognizing them and trying to learn from them. For example, should I be writing this right now, or should I be transcribing interviews? Past experiences would indicate that I'll be a lot happier tomorrow if I can go to the beach and wiggle my toes around in the sand. However, if I continue blogging and not working, I'll be forced to spend tomorrow wiggling my toes around in my slippers while I do schoolwork at home and look out the window, all bitter like I am now. So I have held my past mistakes up, and now I'm holding my current mistake up and recognizing that I totally suck? and doing something about it?
I wish it were that simple, but I think there's some other variable beyond holding up my mistakes. I know pretty much exactly what they are, and exactly how to act so I don't repeat the same mistakes over and over, but something is missing. It's not that I don't have the motivation to do anything, because there are certain things I can finish right away. But when it comes to the things that are most important to my future happiness, like finishing my thesis on time to graduate, I'll find any distraction to avoid it.
In college I had a very similar issue with my undergrad thesis. It got to the point where I went to see the school psychologist, who theorized that I couldn't seem to finish, or really even start, my thesis because I didn't "really want to graduate." I liked my life in college so much that I was subconsciously trying to prolong it, not understanding that in the end it was a self-destuctive plan. That explanation would have seemed pretty sensible, had he not followed it up with the recommendation that I get laid more often. F-ing creep.
In the end, I didn't get laid, but I did finish my thesis. And it SUCKED. ASS. I shudder to think that it's printed and bound, available to any human being who walks into the Trinity library. I thank the Lord every day that I wrote it in Spanish, thus reducing the number of people that would be able to read it if they tried. While I only spent a few months really invested in that thesis, however, I've been obsessed with my master's thesis topic for well over a year now, and up until now, it's the biggest and most important project I've undertaken on any topic.
Beyond the time I've already invested in researching, talking about, and practicing green cleaning, it's something that I'm fairly certain I could devote the rest of my life to. This is going to sound extraordinarily lame, but I care about green cleaning too much to let my first published writing about it to be crap. Yes, I actually think that my weird-ass love for green cleaning is what's holding me back. I'm reminded of an awesome but little-known Talking Heads song called "Sax and Violins" (yes, they could have made the title's allusion a little less flagrant, but whatever, they're the Talking Heads and they don't subscribe to 'subtle'. Plus, there really is a saxophone playing in the song. Kind of. Anyways...)
wooden heads
furniture with legs
for sale
love keeps us together
love will drive us insane
So yeah, the jist of it is that I love green cleaning too much to ever let it go, to ever 'finish' writing about it. And this love is, as it were, driving me insane. The funny thing is, there are people in my program with the exact opposite problem: they are so disillusioned with their topic that they also find themselves unable to finish writing, whether because they think the topic is a problem with no solution or because they have come to think it's something that just doesn't matter.
While I'm certainly disillusioned with the process, with having to write and prove myself and all that, and I'm certainly not getting anywhere by writing about it instead of writing about IT, the essence of my problem is that I'm too obsessed with my thesis and too optimistic about my topic, not too indifferent. In the end, while it might be self-destructive or psychotic or just plain weird, I think I'd much rather keep it that way.
Friday, March 09, 2007
untz untz untz
my interview was, technically speaking, f-ing awesome. this guy told me bloodcurdling tales of floor stripping woe: shoes destroyed, third-degree burns, legs lost... seriously, legs lost. while all of these things, coupled with his happier anecdotes about the switch to green cleaning, speak directly to what I'm trying to prove, I feel more than a little guilty for how I got at it. I mean, how can I be so selfish as to revel in these horrible things happening, just because it supports my goal of promoting green cleaning? I've always been a firm non-believer in the "ends justify the means" theory, so I'm hating myself a bit for even having recorded this thing.
Luckily, my own stupidity assuages a little bit of my guilt, as I accidentally turned my recorder speed all the way up to "fast" and didn't notice it until 45 minutes into the interview. I was too scared to review the tape, but I have a feeling it's going to take a lot of technology finagling to get this thing transcribed. On that note, I've completely embraced my nerdiness and decided that I want voice-to-text software for Christmas.
In other news, it's spring break! I'm not going anywhere fun, or even doing anything fun in Lowell - in fact, I'll probably sit around the library writing my thesis and generally being miserable all week. For some reason, though, just knowing it's spring break is enough to make me feel all vacation-y. I forsee a good amount of weeknight drinking and general irresponsibilty this week, not really different than any other week except that I feel somehow entitled to it since it's spring break...
Luckily, my own stupidity assuages a little bit of my guilt, as I accidentally turned my recorder speed all the way up to "fast" and didn't notice it until 45 minutes into the interview. I was too scared to review the tape, but I have a feeling it's going to take a lot of technology finagling to get this thing transcribed. On that note, I've completely embraced my nerdiness and decided that I want voice-to-text software for Christmas.
In other news, it's spring break! I'm not going anywhere fun, or even doing anything fun in Lowell - in fact, I'll probably sit around the library writing my thesis and generally being miserable all week. For some reason, though, just knowing it's spring break is enough to make me feel all vacation-y. I forsee a good amount of weeknight drinking and general irresponsibilty this week, not really different than any other week except that I feel somehow entitled to it since it's spring break...
Thursday, March 08, 2007
on tardiness and human suffering
so I originally wrote this haiku almost a year ago, but much like Moby Dick or War and Peace, it is (unfortunately) just as relevant today as it was the day it was written:
data collection
Satan invented grad school
I'll sleep when I'm dead
weirdly enough, I'd kill to be in the situation I was in when I wrote that back in May. At the time I thought things couldn't get worse, but I was oh so wrong. unbeknownst to me, I was actually ahead of the game - I had done at least ten interviews, I was reading green cleaning stuff every day and really staying on top of the policy developments. By some accounts, I was "overacheiving." Well, I sure showed them.
I basically took an extended vacation from my thesis all summer and then started a new, more dangerous period of thesis latency right after I defended my proposal. in, uh, november. thank GOD one of my professors, my beloved Uncle Bill, snapped me out of it a few weeks ago by giving me a fake assignment and holding me to the fake deadline. my other professor/thesis supervisor/boss/everything had tried to go the "no pressure, I know you are going to do a great job" route, but I found it way too eay to focus on all the other stuff we were working on.
it makes me a little nervous that I need to be lied to to get motivated to do things on time. it isn't just my thesis, or even just schoolwork. my boss tells me that our monthly newspaper deadline is the second Tuesday, when secretly it's Wednesday. my friends will occasionally tell me something starts at, say, 9 o'clock, hoping I'll make it there by 10. most of all, I lie to myself, or at least I try. all of my clocks are set fast, and not just a little. I even mix it up so as to trick myself as much as possible: the clock in my car is 33 minutes fast, my alarm clock is 25 minutes fast, and my Super Loud alarm clock (the one I keep 15 feet away from my bed, hoping in vain that it will get me out of bed, which it doesn't because I've learned to sleep through it) is 31 minutes fast. I am still consistently 5 minutes late to things like important appointments, usually about 15 minutes late to regular appointments, and I shudder to think what my average lateness to social events is.
but I digress (I think my tendency to digress, both in my own head and in person has a lot to do with why I can't do anything on time). see? I just digressed again! I think "anyhow" is one of the most common words in my everyday vernacular. Anyhow, the point here is that I suck at getting things done and I'm NEVER going to finish my thesis on time to graduate in June.
I have a few interviews scheduled, which is great, but I know myself too well to think I'll be able to transcribe everything and analyze it, or whatever, and get it all down and perfected in a month. It pisses me off to no end that I even have to write this thing. All the information is up here (picture me pointing at my head), so why do I have to write it down? I'm so f-ing sick of having to prove myself to the f-ing academic community. In the time it's taking me to write this thing, I could have organized 50 janitors, made 500 bottles of my special all-purpose green surface cleaner, and proselytized to 5000 consumers. I need to be out disseminating, not inside glued to my computer. It's making me very bitter, and I hate to become disillusioned with something I love so much.
So my first interview of this second round is tomorrow, and I'm hoping it will reenergize me and give me some of that momentum back. I need to go to bed now, or else I'll oversleep and be late. I know what you're thinking, I'm probably going to be late anyways. It might be true, but I can't plan on it...
data collection
Satan invented grad school
I'll sleep when I'm dead
weirdly enough, I'd kill to be in the situation I was in when I wrote that back in May. At the time I thought things couldn't get worse, but I was oh so wrong. unbeknownst to me, I was actually ahead of the game - I had done at least ten interviews, I was reading green cleaning stuff every day and really staying on top of the policy developments. By some accounts, I was "overacheiving." Well, I sure showed them.
I basically took an extended vacation from my thesis all summer and then started a new, more dangerous period of thesis latency right after I defended my proposal. in, uh, november. thank GOD one of my professors, my beloved Uncle Bill, snapped me out of it a few weeks ago by giving me a fake assignment and holding me to the fake deadline. my other professor/thesis supervisor/boss/everything had tried to go the "no pressure, I know you are going to do a great job" route, but I found it way too eay to focus on all the other stuff we were working on.
it makes me a little nervous that I need to be lied to to get motivated to do things on time. it isn't just my thesis, or even just schoolwork. my boss tells me that our monthly newspaper deadline is the second Tuesday, when secretly it's Wednesday. my friends will occasionally tell me something starts at, say, 9 o'clock, hoping I'll make it there by 10. most of all, I lie to myself, or at least I try. all of my clocks are set fast, and not just a little. I even mix it up so as to trick myself as much as possible: the clock in my car is 33 minutes fast, my alarm clock is 25 minutes fast, and my Super Loud alarm clock (the one I keep 15 feet away from my bed, hoping in vain that it will get me out of bed, which it doesn't because I've learned to sleep through it) is 31 minutes fast. I am still consistently 5 minutes late to things like important appointments, usually about 15 minutes late to regular appointments, and I shudder to think what my average lateness to social events is.
but I digress (I think my tendency to digress, both in my own head and in person has a lot to do with why I can't do anything on time). see? I just digressed again! I think "anyhow" is one of the most common words in my everyday vernacular. Anyhow, the point here is that I suck at getting things done and I'm NEVER going to finish my thesis on time to graduate in June.
I have a few interviews scheduled, which is great, but I know myself too well to think I'll be able to transcribe everything and analyze it, or whatever, and get it all down and perfected in a month. It pisses me off to no end that I even have to write this thing. All the information is up here (picture me pointing at my head), so why do I have to write it down? I'm so f-ing sick of having to prove myself to the f-ing academic community. In the time it's taking me to write this thing, I could have organized 50 janitors, made 500 bottles of my special all-purpose green surface cleaner, and proselytized to 5000 consumers. I need to be out disseminating, not inside glued to my computer. It's making me very bitter, and I hate to become disillusioned with something I love so much.
So my first interview of this second round is tomorrow, and I'm hoping it will reenergize me and give me some of that momentum back. I need to go to bed now, or else I'll oversleep and be late. I know what you're thinking, I'm probably going to be late anyways. It might be true, but I can't plan on it...
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Monday, February 26, 2007
opium of the people
it's 4am, and I'm eating lofthouse cookies, listening to "bluegrass mandolin extravaganza," smoking cigarettes, and reading Bertrand Russell. if grad school is wrong, I don't wanna be right. try this on for size:
"We are sometimes told that only fanaticism can make a social group effective. I think this it totally contrary to the lessons of history. But, in any case, only those who slavishly worship success can think that effectiveness is admirable without regard to what is effected. For my part, I think it better to do a little good than to do much harm. The world that I should wish to see would be freed from the virulence of group hostilities and capable of realizing that happiness for all is to be derived rather from co-operation than from strife. I should wish to see a world in which education aimed at mental freedom rather than at imprisoning the minds of the young in a rigid armor of dogma calculated to protect them through life against the shafts of impartial evidence. The world needs open hearts and open minds, and it is not through rigid systems, whether old or new, that these can be derived."
yes.
"We are sometimes told that only fanaticism can make a social group effective. I think this it totally contrary to the lessons of history. But, in any case, only those who slavishly worship success can think that effectiveness is admirable without regard to what is effected. For my part, I think it better to do a little good than to do much harm. The world that I should wish to see would be freed from the virulence of group hostilities and capable of realizing that happiness for all is to be derived rather from co-operation than from strife. I should wish to see a world in which education aimed at mental freedom rather than at imprisoning the minds of the young in a rigid armor of dogma calculated to protect them through life against the shafts of impartial evidence. The world needs open hearts and open minds, and it is not through rigid systems, whether old or new, that these can be derived."
yes.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
a quick top five to avoid thesis-writing
I just heard the new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah album, "Some Loud Thunder," which is pretty f-ing sweet, and the first new and awesome album I've heard in quite a few months. 2007 just started, so I'll give it some more time, but 2006 was just such an incredible year for weird/delightful new music discovery. So here are my top five albums of the past year or so, which I highly recommend you check out if you haven't already:
5. Gimme Fiction - Spoon
4. Come on Feel the Illiniose - Sufjan Stevens
3. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
2. Funeral - The Arcade Fire
1. Apologies to the Queen Mary - Wolf Parade
5. Gimme Fiction - Spoon
4. Come on Feel the Illiniose - Sufjan Stevens
3. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
2. Funeral - The Arcade Fire
1. Apologies to the Queen Mary - Wolf Parade
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