Nothing gets a blog post going like posting that I will not be posting. That consistently revives my blog.
Next week I have to meet with my director. I have to. I have not met with him since June 20--my prelim exams. I have nothing to offer at this meeting. Seriously nothing. I don't know what is going to happen. I think that I will for the first time look like a slacker to him. I am decidedly not a slacker, and he has complimented my efficiency in the past. But this time I have slacked. I have accomplished many other important non-dissertation-related academic things in the past two months, but I have not done anything on the diss. Except read, but that doesn't count. Really it doesn't count. A mentor once said to me that research is endlessly seductive. So true. Reading is easy and fun and obviously necessary to the process, but if we're being truly honest, we are not actually accomplishing anything--not "producing knowledge" to borrow a phrase I heard from a professor last week--unless we are writing. That is at least true for me--I do not begin to truly synthesize ideas until I write.
I am not being lazy. I am being scared. A paralyzing anxiety keeps me from this project.
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4 comments:
You're not a slacker. I've done nothing for a whole month longer than you.
I am the ultimate slacker--I bailed on my Ph.D. program two chapters into my diss. Seriously. I just up and left. I'm still on the department web site, five years later, and I think my advisor might still be waiting on a draft from me. It took me five years, prelims, and a diss. proposal to do it, but leaving was the best decision I could have made for myself.
That said, I have the ultimate respect for you for trying to balance motherhood with grad school--my own mother just did it, and she finally got her doctorate last year. Believe me, you are no slacker.
so... i am at the end of my phd and about to start writing my thesis. What do you do about being apathetic? I have come to realize how out-dated my mentor is and i'm so very uninterested in his work that finishing anything related to him is...blah. He can obviously sense this as lately he has ridden my case about how much i suddenly suck. Do they all always tell you you suck? How do I make myself get over this last hump? I'm sooooo bored...
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