A Relief

I heard back from my dissertation advisor today about my Buffy chapter. It's such a huge relief. She generally seems very enthusiastic about the chapter. I haven't gotten the part with the specific edits/comments yet, but end-notes, and while those notes do indicate that I do have work to do still (which I knew) they are probably the best comments I've gotten thus far from her on a first draft. There's actually a sense of excitement in the comments from her, as though she was probably thinking "finally, Kim's getting this thing done correctly." So that's cool.

I had told Andrew that this chapter was* in some ways the scariest. I've turned in other chapters, knowing that there was the chance that the committee would reject them and I'd have to start all over. But since this one felt like it was working, and it made me feel optimistic, like maybe I can do this thing after all, if she had come back with negative, "wow, this just isn't working" comments, I would have been seriously depressed. So that's why it was so scary, cause in the past, the chapters that haven't worked have thrown me into a funk that took a while to get out of. And as we all know, I don't have a while to mope.

Anyway. This is just a quick expression of excitement on my part that the work I've done in the past month has been productive. I need to actually get to work on the stuff I have right now.

As you all know, I am a procrastinator (unless you're new here-- the blog USED to be called Kim Procrastinates... laying it out there right on the line). I think I always knew that I wouldn't get this damn thing done till the absolute last minute. That's the way I roll, babe. Now that we're ticking down into last-minute-ville, I'm cruising into my best mode. :)

One of my friends, who also took a while to finish her dissertation, recently told me "apparently these things DO get done." I'm beginning to feel that way. And that, my friends, is absolutely thrilling.

*Ugh. My "w" key is sticking, and as I type this, I keep having to go back and correct words with a "W" at the start. Makes for some interesting moments in editing. :)

MADDENING!!!!

I just made corrections to a too old version of my introduction. Then, once I realized that, and tried to send the newer version to myself on my laptop so that I can correct the proper draft, for some ANNOYING reason, my mail program won't send the document to me when I need it. This is the trouble with having two computers that are hard to share with. My laptop doesn't have a floppy drive, so I either have to send a version to myself via email or burn a version to a CD. It seems like SUCH a waste of CD material to burn one tiny file to a whole CD, so I try to send it as an attachment to email. But then something weird happens with my virus program or something, and even though it OUGHT to be in my mailbox, it isn't. Then, when I go to the other computer to check to see why it's not there, it gets mailed to me on that computer. I didn't need it on that computer!! It's already ON THAT COMPUTER!!! Argh.

Just a moment of time in my day. It will get better but it's annoying. This rant will help, plus it gives my email program a moment to catch up with me. Hopefully the time it has taken to write this rant will mean my file is now in my mailbox for me to download. If it isn't, I'm going to burn a CD. It's just too damned annoying, cause now I have to go REDO those corrections (luckily, there weren't many).

Must make the chapters named something other than "new draft" and "newer draft." That makes sense for about five minutes. Then, I don't know which one is really the newer one. For a smart person, sometimes I am a dork.

Rainy Day Musings

Still here, still plugging away at the dissertation and enjoying my babies. They are growing and changing every day, and every day I am so amazed by them. They are definitely becoming, as half the people we run into when shopping say "a handful." Now that both are crawling pretty well, one will go off in one direction while the other goes in another. They particularly like chewing on the legs of the barstools. This is fine on the regular ones but the ones that have a hydraulic ability to raise & lower has some kind of oily goop that gets on their faces. Ick.

Sunday night, Sean fell and hit his head hard enough to make the poor little man puke up some of his dinner. I was scared until I read on the internet that one puking really isn't that big of a deal if there aren't any other signs of distress. Thank god for the internet; it makes parenting so much less scary.

The conclusion chapter is getting started. I have to figure out exactly what I want to say. For the most part, it's just a matter of saying "here's what I said in the other chapters" but I do need to make a final claim or two. Sum it up, you know? And that is what I need to figure out, that and how to organize the other stuff.

And I'm blogging because it sometimes helps me think. The whole dissertation is about witches and power, how the depiction of witches in some texts illustrate a form of feminist rhetoric. In my conclusion, I want to briefly touch on John Updike's Witches of Eastwick as a counter-example, one that (in the book version) deliberately attacks the women's movement using stereotypical witches.

But then what? That's what I'm thinking of now. People have laughed at me for taking as long as I have to write my dissertation, and sometimes will ask "are you still working on that" or, as Andrew's uncle said last weekend "oh, you picked that up again?" I never put it down, dude. I'm always thinking of it, trying to get my brain around how to say it so that my committee will accept it.

A long time ago, I contacted people who had written dissertations on the authors I have another website about. I hoped they would contribute stuff to the website. I remember that one woman was fairly bitter and said her dissertation had been forced into a direction she didn't want to go and she just didn't want to do anything at all with it anymore. I remember thinking how sad that was... One writes a dissertation on a subject one likes. And for the dissertation to ruin one's enjoyment of that subject... well, it seemed sort of awful to me then. Now I understand it better. You write what will make your committee happy so that you can just get it over with. You pick your battles...and get on with it. I so far have not changed my main point but I do have to shape it in a way that is not exactly my normal style of writing to make my committee happy.

Anyway. It's almost time for my babysitter to leave, so I need to wrap up my work for the day. But my point earlier was that I am always thinking of my work. I dreamt about it all last night. So far, though, the inspiration fairy has not come. Exactly how to word the last part has not yet surfaced. It will. But not today. I still did a bunch of work, but it's just the start of the end. :)

It's Off!

The chapter on Buffy is off in the email to my dissertation chair, who has promised to get to it quickly.

It feels like it works. I hope that it does. It's a little long, and I haven't yet added the pictures and "screenshots" that will eventually be part of it.

But I'm tired, tired, tired!!!

I also feel like I was a terrible mommy today. Andrew had to play with the babies most of the day as I feverishly tried to get the chapter done on my set deadline. I could have waited till Monday, yes, but I wanted to get it done today like I said I would.

Now I have the weekend to rest, and then Monday I will begin my conclusion chapter. Yay!!!

Cute baby alert

Ah yes, it's time again for those cutest baby ever photos. You can see these bigger if you log in to the Kodak gallery...

But aren't these ADORABLE?!?!

They are too cute.

Wow!

So, today, at Starbuck's (my writing place) I got to a place where I can say I am done with the first draft of my Buffy chapter. This is a big step!! I need to have the draft TO my committee soon, and my conclusion chapter written and to my committee, along with the edited versions of all the other chapters, by the end of April. Then that leaves the whole summer to revise as the committee sees fit, and then to defend the dissertation before my September deadline.

So in having the Buffy chapter to a place that I can call "the end of the first draft" I ought to be about a week away from sending that chapter to the committee!! And then that means all I have left to completely compose is my conclusion chapter. And that means that the April deadline is certainly do-able, given that I have managed to get a lot of work done on this Buffy chapter in a couple of weeks, and the conclusion chapter is MOSTLY just me saying "Here's what I said in the other chapters." (There will be some new stuff on some of the other texts I initially thought I'd do a whole separate chapter on... but not a lot).

This is very exciting. I have gone through a lot of places with my dissertation, from gleeful "Hey this'll be easy" (back in the beginning days, long long ago.) to "I'm never going to get this done" and "I feel like quitting; I'll just teach high school with my Master's degree". So now I am at a place where it is again starting to feel do-able.

When my best friend finally gets her PhD this May, and I go to her graduation, and her family & our friends ask me "So how much longer for you?" (as they are sure to ask; they will not be able to contain themselves) I can say, and mean, I will be done this fall.

Wow. Now to look at the draft which just finished printing on my printer there, which is waiting, all warm and papery, on the top of the printer. It still needs lots of work, don't get me wrong. But it's finally a full draft. That's getting somewhere.

I'm all a-gog.

Oh, and in other news, I cut my hair again yesterday. Short. BOY short. Like, she had to clean up the back of my neck with a razor short. :) Like Alyssa Milano in Charmed a couple of seasons ago short. Sean especially kept pulling my hair, and he would catch the tender hair at the nape of my neck and OUCH! And I was tired of having a messy hairdo, pulled up into a ponytail. Now it's easy to style-- wash it, gel it, and "I'm out the do". I'll post pix soonish, maybe. :) It's a little butch, but I'm content with it for now. I'll grow it long again when I'm done with my dissertation and the babies are a little older. Fun! :)