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. :)