Ouch, My Head

In the past three months things have started to go surprisingly well. I am motoring along on my chapters and have now submitted two to my supervisor. He is relaxing at his cottage this weekend and supposedly giving them deep consideration. He even suggested a real live phone call next week. If I thought he had read the chapters already this would terrify me, but he’s probably just trying to avoid having to type his comments.

In the middle of all this cheery progress I have been forced to stop working and look at my post-doctoral future. Do I have one? Who knows. I’m writing an application to study a whole new subject (of course logically built on my vast understanding and research) that will carry me through the next two years. Slowly putting each piece into place so that I can save my career. One of the hardest things about all of this is putting your future into the hands of a shadowy body of experts. Can only hope they see things my way and dispense the largess of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in my direction. It has happened before, and they say lightening always strikes the same spot in academe. Who knows.

Here’s to another several months in my windowless room. Getting paid to do it would make all the difference.

Finished teaching last week and it left me as big finishes usually do – lost. I had gotten so used to being stressed out and unhappy that my class finished and I went on feeling stressed, but about very minor things. I finally had to realize I need to take a step back from what has been going on for the past month.

After worrying myself sick about cancer for the past six weeks I am trying to take a new direction. You can’t go through life like George Costanza when something terrible is actually happening to you. You’ll go psychotic. So I’m trying to be more zen like about it all, but there is also a pressure to move in this direction. If you get cancer you are supposed to awaken spiritually, count your blessings and become a better person. It is bullshit, but I still feel like I’m supposed to be different now. I suppose I am just lazy.

However, I am trying to move in a direction that at least says “I treated cancer” instead of “my god, I have cancer.” Probably an important distinction and it at least allows me not to panic all day long.

Now I can go back to panicking about my work. I submitted my paper to both my supervisor and his partner and they both proclaimed it wonderful. I think maybe they were just feeling bad for me. My supervisor said congratulations because apparently the first draft was so awful and he never believed it could be whipped into shape. Were they just being nice because they thought I was down? I don’t know. Anyways, my paper is off to the conference. The other papers on my panel read like economics textbooks. I am the wrong type of leftist maybe because I don’t understand a goddamn thing. But part of me also thinks that I’m not this stupid. Maybe I’m the wrong type of leftist. Anyways, I will show up again and do my little song and dance and then skulk away uncomfortably. It is my niche.

Surprisingly, things are not going that badly. I hit rock bottom on Saturday and my girlfriend sat me down to figure out why I have accomplished nothing in three weeks (not counting a feeble 2,000 word introduction to my paper.) We hashed it out and the issue seems to be internet addiction combined with laziness. 

Ok, the discussion was a little deeper than that, but the long and the short of it is that I had better wake the fuck up and take control of things before my career ends up in the dump. What career? 

Since then, I have had some highs and lows but I am cobbling together a draft of my paper that may not be too awful. My girlfriend has agreed to read it before we go away for her birthday on Saturday night. 

This is risky because the biggest fights we have ever had resulted from her reading my work. I can be an insecure ass, especially when somebody suggests I don’t know what I’m talking about (I don’t.) But I prefer denial. 

One person who doesn’t prefer denial is my supervisor who tells me I suck every time I give him anything. Sometimes he does this directly, sometimes subtly. Once I wrote him a long e-mail about Nikolai Bukharin, trying to work something out and asking for his opinion. He replied, “you don’t need to worry about Bukharin.” My girlfriend said I was an idiot for asking in the first place. 

In any case, I push forward, I keep plugging. 

Also, title refers to the fact that I need Tom Petty tickets and there are none to be found. Of course, I had some in the eleventh row on the day they went on sale. But then I felt remorse about spending 300 dollars I don’t have and abstained. I’m an idiot. 

It’s not the paragraphs that are difficult to get down on paper, it’s the transition sentences between them. I suppose this hints at the fact that I don’t know exactly where I’m going if I can’t seem to get from one section to the next. 

This is the type of honest thing I would like to say to my supervisor (if we ever talked.) I’d say “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. Help me.” But I think he hates weakness and would only sort of kick my carcass with the end of his boot before stepping over me. “Keep plugging!” He would say hopelessly as he walked away. 

Why is it that I am convinced that I know exactly what I’m doing until I actually sit down and write it? Then it ends up in a pile of rubble on the floor of my word document and I am left feeling hopeless. 

I can’t believe this article is due in two months. And I can’t believe I am traveling internationally to tell people what I have discovered. 

I am lapsing into the old habit of writing by refusing to write anything. I will type out ridiculous instructions to myself in my paper like “here is where you will stick the section on Michael Ignatieff (hint: he’s an ass!)” 

The problem is, I am terrible at going back and making good on the promise of these little instructions. So I allow myself to think I am doing more writing than I actually am. And then I end up going back and covering old ground that I should have just written the first time. 

I suppose nobody sits down and writes a book they way it is read in final draft (except my supervisor.) So this style of writing would be acceptable if I didn’t use it as a procrastination tool. 

Here is the paragraph I am struggling to analyze right now. My first instincts about evidence are usually wrong, so I’m letting it gestate for a while. Another brilliant procrastination! A prison doctor’s report from 1883:

The state of things is by no means easily maintained – the small size of the cells, the defective sewerage, together with other matters more directly referable to the original location and design of this Penitentiary, render it more obnoxious to disease, than if of more modern construction. The massing together also of men, most of whom are of low moral type, with confirmed filthy habits, and broken down constitutions inherited and acquired, offer facilities for the advancement of disease, which demands the most humane and vigilant effort to avert… 

This passage is clearly about sewage, right?