Leap into a New Lease

We got an extra day today, even though it already feels like March and feels like spring until the end of the week when the cold returns.  March weather a bit more mercurial, but appreciate the extra month to squeeze a last few wears in my winter clothes, which weren't even touched until January this year.

Admittedly, I have not felt particularly grand lately, which I attribute to writing my dissertation, and even I am a little bit sick of myself.  The lease started it.

I live in a great place with crown molding and new appliances.  I remodeled my home a bit last year, added new shelving to create a library nook and a few new pieces of furniture.  I only thought I would be here another year.

But even then, I cried when I signed the lease.  This year, I didn't cry, but rather held onto the bleary mood for a couple of weeks now.

I used to have a real home.  It was a cute, small house on the water.  In the summer, I would read or paint on the deck in my underwear.  When times were bad, everything was fine as long as you could see the light across the lake at night.  There were daffodils and tulips in the spring, a lilac tree, and a bleeding magnolia to greet you by the driveway.  Anything bleeding was an omen of living in that house.

But now I have this home and all of the conveniences of living here.  I am lucky.  I resisted leases for a while.  I did not want to be tethered to one place.  Nothing is certain and I wanted my lease to reflect that.  I wanted to believe at any moment, destiny would arrive and I would have nothing standing in my way.  So, I did not sign leases.  I paid a little extra, but considered it buying my freedom.

Signing a lease means I am here but really here, it is home but not my home.  It means I stay put for another contractually agreed upon term.  All the hopes I had for this year are again on hold.

I keep reminding myself I have enough but feel incredibly empty.  Time feels cramped with work, writing, researching, appointments, planning fieldwork, and the few personal obligations I am able to squeeze in.  I miss my family.

I have a post-doctoral bucket list.  It mostly includes learning things that are not methodologically or theoretically based.  It includes:  Sailing.  Playing the harp.  Quilting.  Mastering new pieces on the piano.  Hiking.  Visiting Europe.  Italian.  Swedish or Dutch.

Those items are not goals or dreams.  Those items are about a life.  Perhaps that is what I am grappling with, ultimately, is a total loss of dreams.  While finding an online community for something I am trying to figure out in my personal life, I came across this blog and "test" about letting go of dreams.  When I scrolled through the questions, I realized that nobody who is seriously writing a dissertation could answer positively.

Sure, there are the ones on social media or blogs that constantly boast about the conference they are attending or #dissertationproblems.  But those are mostly the humble-brag variety that are in place of the garden variety cat/dog/spouse/child posts.   As if to say, "Look at me and the super awesome yummy thing I am doing."  (I loathe the word "yummy".  We are not 5 years old.)

The goal for the past 13 years was a PhD to launch a career in academia.  The dream was to become an Asian studies professor at a small liberal arts college.  I am not ready to let that go, but I am just not sure how that is going to pan out.  In fact, I am not sure what the future looks like at all, which probably means I should be foot loose and fanny-free right now except I am terrified.

(I know it's "fancy-free" but I always thought my mom was saying "fanny-free", which seemed like a lot more fun, like this:).  

I will use the last 65 degree day before the cold front to go running.  Soon it will be cardigan weather, then sundress weather.  The pool opens in 90 days.  Then I will sit on the edge with my toes in the crystal blue water with a novel in my hand.  The days will be longer.  I will have an amnesia of the winter.  I will also be 90 days closer to defending.

It's Clear. I'm in the Wrong Band.

From the dispatches of Friday melancholy, where 24 hours of total isolation with a dissertation is not enough and simultaneously soul crushing, listening to rush hour roll through the highway, the throng of commuters returning to home to live normal lives on the weekend.  It seems as though spring is coming, it's an atmosphere, a smell that belies the bare trees with a bouquet of metallic red balloons stuck in the heights of the branches.

I should write something.  I should write something, 15 minutes a day, according to Joan Bolker.  But am still awaiting feedback on a chapter and given tangents to follow but I am not entirely certain what I am supposed to be following, all while writing my proposal for IRB and my methodology section while paralyzed from making contacts to recruit a target population.  This is probably the messiest, unsatisfying thing I have ever done (of my own doing.  I deserve a Pulitzer for cleaning up everyone else's crap).

I am really struggling with the complete lack of consistent time I am able to devote to just writing.  I can really only devote one focus a day to tasks-- Professional work and dissertation work.  They cannot share and in competition with one another.  It also takes an extraordinary amount of effort to refocus, thus the lack of writing that vexes me.

Every issue I attempt to resolve--  nailing down a definition for precision, operationalizing a concept-- leads down a rabbit hole.  This week, that rabbit hole is reconciling work identity and gender relations, which can only be found in the flowery walls of numerous ethnographies about Japan.

Ethnographies are great.  They have a place.  I wish I was an anthropologist.  Then I could write an ethnography too and enjoy telling a story overlaid with nebulous theory.   But I am not.  I'm a social scientist and I cannot wade through chapters of non-generalizable observations to come to a point that I can bring into my own research.  So this week, the bane of my existence is ethnographies.

I also think it is "perfectly clear we're in the wrong band."  This week was also the monthly planning meeting for an organization I serve as a leader.  I have found myself volunteering to serve various organizations either on the brink of nonexistence or rekindling and then regretting the decision after I join.

Each month, I attend the meetings for this group and seethe in complete agitation the entire time.  I rarely respond to emails and then worry about coming across as disengaged.  As I explored this agitation, it occurred to me that I am not one of them.  On face I am:  I am completing my second graduate degree in this disciplined and worked in the sector.

I was once like them.  Eager to participate and willing to donate my time for the effort.  I was optimistic and earnest.  But things life happened.  Things changed.

Perhaps it is only palpable to me.  To everyone else, I am just a quiet doctoral student who attends the meetings, rarely divulges details on her personal life, and never attends extraneous social functions.  But as I look around at the candidate who just recently passed his proposal defense, regularly presents at major conferences, and just published a peer-reviewed journal article; the fellow who joins every associated organization; and all the like, I am no longer an all-star.

When I started, my life was packaged with a neat bow.  I grew up with a lot of instability, but rarely with any sort of worry.  Life then was stable and I happily settled into it.  Then the rug was pulled out from under me.

There were two long distance moves.  A portfolio of jobs, contracts, projects.  Each decision a choice stemming from a choice someone else made.  While I was making plans, someone else was undermining them until the bottom fell out.

I arrive as though I stepped out of a J. Crew catalog.  But I work twice as hard to get to that meeting and anywhere else we meet in proposals, conferences, presentations.  I don't get to make choices about my academic career from the vantage point of luxury but on the verge of countless other doctoral candidates who are unable to show up at that table due to extra jobs, finances, and sheer exhaustion.

I also straddle two disciplines, one of which is recognized at my institution, and the other which is not, leaving me to question my career prospects when most notable scholars in the second field hail from reputable institutions with copious grants.  That fear sieges me each Fulbright funded ethnography I annotate and every NHI grant-funded article I cite.

So the sun is setting and I am not sure what I am supposed to write tonight.  I wonder can I just sit this one out.  Watch Netflix.  Order a steak.  Drink a cocktail.

There are no deadlines but infinite extensions.

*"In the Wrong Band" by Tori Amos.  “I ran into hookers about this time and became friends with particularly one of them who finally had to leave because she felt her life was in danger because she was seeing somebody on the Hill, and she knew too much; and she fled to Japan because of a powerful warlord-she went to go be protected by him, and I never heard from her."  -Tori Amos

I Regret Not Going to Pittsburgh

I regret not going to Pittsburgh.

The opportunity was there this weekend.  A Tuesday evening spur-of-the-moment dinner idea to go up there.  It was not my trip to Pittsburgh, but I poo-pooed it.

I am tired, I said.  There is little point when we have so much work to do here, I reasoned.  I really just wanted to wake up in my own bed in my own time on two of the coldest days of the year instead of waking up in the middle of the night, trying to figure out where I am based on the shape of the window in the moonlight.  I often wake up confused this way in this life.  I'm not sure how I ended up here.

Anyway, I now regret not going to Pittsburgh.  I could have spent the day watching the scenery roll by my window than figuring out the point of the book I was reading or cleaning up after the cat who knocked over an entire litter box.  I could have enjoyed a slice of pie at Eat N Park for dinner instead instant gnocchi ala Trader Joes.  This is the second meal I cooked and ate alone today.

Instead of thinking of the people I want to visit in this town but have no time (parents, grandparents, colleague, best girl friend), I could have met with old friends who knew me when I younger, a past me, a lost me.  I will think about going out, pick up take out, spends some time out, but stay in, reading, taking notes, strategizing.  Perhaps I will write.

But I will be thinking about Pittsburgh.  Much like I thought about Pittsburgh over the years, wondering where I would be now, if I just picked Pittsburgh when it picked me.  Most people do not know that about me.  Most people know little about me.  I never let on much and eventually people assume your one dimension.

There is proof.  Photographs:  Leaning against the rail of the riverboat on the Monongahela.  Posing next to an installation of polka dot mannequins.  In the Japanese room of the Cathedral of Learning (called "real sexy" and "gorgeous", I hear that less now).  Letters:  Congratulations!  Welcome!

Sunday will be Valentine's Day and we will talk about leases and futures and plans and dreams.

Monday will be traffic jams, meetings, deadlines, microwaves, peanut butter.

I will regret not going to Pittsburgh.  With books sprawled around me, cats at my feet, and cold coffee, I will not see the forest from the trees, even in bare woods of winter.

On Fleek

Lately, this meme is pretty popular:

It's a nice variant of this:

I have a problem.  I don't have nice eyebrows.  

This problem is I hit adolescence when this was the feminine ideal:

I am not blonde.  My hair is so dark I cannot even convincingly purchase blonde.  I also had thick eyebrows.  My mom always drew comparisons to Sela Ward or Brooke Shields, but they were passe when the girl next door poses for Playboy.  So for years, I mutilated my brows with tweezing and waxing.  There was one awful experiment with a tool that was akin to sandpaper.  It would have been a fantastic case study for Sheila Jeffries.  

The brows worked for a while.  They were complimented for their sheer perfection.  I think you call this "on fleek."  

But then Cara Delevinge hit the scene.  A girl was learning motor skills when thin was in.  Ever since then, it's been we like big brows and we cannot lie.  

Big brows are the signal of youth and beauty now.  What would have been considered abominable during the years I trained to be an acceptable woman is now a near obsession with endless vlogger eyebrow tutorials, eyebrow makeup products, and even eyebrow transplants.  

The ones who believe the dictum to "never trust someone with bad eyebrows" probably haven't become tired of being yanked around on the fashion hamster wheel where women are subject to the constantly changing whims of patriarchy, shelling out time and money to keep up, but you will.  

But never mind me.  I have bad brows.  It's hard to tell.  You are too distracted by my perfectly cut bangs that rival Zooey Deschanel to notice they did not grow back in to my teenage glory and require help from a pencil.  But it really important I do not leave the house with that.  Otherwise, my two graduate degrees would be completely useless and nobody would listen to me.  My life must be on fleek.  

I am glad I manage to squeak by.  Some women not only have bad eyebrows but bad hair too.  Others wear mom jeans and tapered pants.  Definitely do not trust them.  Some lead large agencies that perform critical missions and others made breakthroughs in medicine.  A few even wrote prize-winning works of poetry or fiction while a handful drafted legislation.  But they are irrelevant.  Their lives are not on fleek.  

Barnard College president Debora Spar wrote once about the number of hours she spent achieving beauty standards, hours that men do not spend.  She write about the pressure to be a Wonder Woman. Sometimes I wonder with the time I spend flat ironing my hair everyday how many journal articles I could have written for peer-review.  I was once told at a major conference that I was "too pretty" to work on a PhD.  So don't take it from me.  

Frankly, I am tired of "on fleek."  Rarely do my dinners appear anything like my Pinterest cookbook. My desk looks less like studyspo and more like a nuclear disaster area.  I am also tired of drawn on caterpillar eyebrows.  

I had a professor some years back who was very attractive and svelte but wore clothes that appeared to harken from the 1990s.  "Come on, Sarah," one of my classmates whispered.  "You would be a knock out if you didn't wear those frocks."  She was young and youthful, stunningly intelligent, but even I wondered what she would look like if she colored the silver streaks in her hair.  

It is kind of funny though.  Her frumpy dresses and tinseled hair did not make an impression on my life.  The interviewing techniques I learned to memorialize oral histories did impact my life. Eliciting narratives from men and women so they tell their stories, narratives, thoughts, desires, fears whether it is about their medical care to facing discrimination.  I still have not found a useful medium for drab jumpers.  My hair is starting to develop a silver lining.  

I hope you enjoy your life on fleek.  But don't tune us out so quickly.  One day you may even laugh at your brows.  A double-chin or skin tag may appear and there is nothing you can do about it.  But you will still have a lot to say.  

 

Thanks for Taking Rio De Janeiro

Earning a PhD is an out of body experience.  Often I see other people living my life and I want to say, "Hey, that's mine, give it back."

I fell asleep when I should have been writing my methodology section and my methodology section is just of the many days standing between me and anywhere but here.  That some people garages and can warm up their cars on 16 degree mornings or Rio De Janeiro.  I just have enough.

They say there is enough to go around, it is such a common commodity.

We All Dreaded Today

That's all.  The first day back at the university after winter break.  We survived and are all back to normal.  Sleeping without an alarm clock puncturing our dreams.  Forgetting what day it is.  Eating lunch at 4 o'clock in the afternoon.  Reading books for fun.  It's a past time for another year.

As for me, I wasn't there.  After celebrating Christmas with friends and family, I took off for my annual post-Christmas trip.  I was heartened to hear feedback from a coworker who remarked, "We just didn't know where you would turn up next."

Unfortunately, between traveling, visiting, and fooding, there was little time for all of the leisurely and required reading I was supposed to do.  The books accompanied me in each hotel I checked into, but only on the last leg of the trip did any serious reading get done.  And that novel I brought along is earmarked at page 108.

I used to be a voracious reader.  One could not feed me books quickly enough before I devoured them, one after the other.  Grad school stole my joy of reading.  The truth is, you have to speed read to finish the required and supplemental texts of a class and to produce solid research papers, you must be able to hunt, peck, discern, accept, reject, and synthesize at lightning speed.  Combine this with learning to code qualitative text and the next thing you know, Stephen King is just a bunch of lifeless words on a page.  That is, I have lost my imagination.

I think in abstracts, statistical significance, and theoretical frameworks.  I still have a strong craving for nonfiction, which has replaced fiction and poetry if done so artfully.  When I found copies of "Quiet" and "Rosemary" waiting for me at my desk this morning, I could not resist thumbing through the pages.  My coworker eats books like air; she finished nine over her break.

As I edited an article I started writing, my red pen dripping over the copy, it occurred to me that I no longer know how to write.  I lamented about this in an earlier blog post, but not sure what to do about it.  It is not the free flowing thoughts and words that are problematic.  It is crafting them, pruning sentences, designing paragraphs, that I see so clearly yet not quite sure how to do it.  Writing has always been so natural and raw; to do any refining is almost an admission that it could have been better and will never be good enough.

Lately, I rekindled my interest in journaling.  I have kept a journal consistently for years since high school (aside from the mandatory marble journal assignments in elementary school, slam books, and girlish attempts at a diary).  I stopped journaling for a three year period but intermittently maintained this blog.  I can forget those years now.

I resumed about three years ago and not terribly committed.  There are still blank pages from where I meant to memorialized last year's trips and I still have not recorded this year.  Frankly, I am intimidated by Pinterest.

Journaling on Pinterest includes an array of art journals, bullet journals, gratitude journals, and smash books.  Then you have Wreck this Journal.  It seems without washi tape and Copic markers, your journal sucks.

I am a decent artist when I apply myself, but I really don't have to the time when I am writing prose. I am also not particularly savvy with conjuring cute doodles to accentuate my articulate musings.  I also don't have a lot of patience to cut shit up and paste it into a slam book, which sounds like something you do in middle school.

Gratitude journals are great and I am grateful, but I am even more grateful to have a sacred place where I can occasionally bitch without reservation while sounding like Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf.  This is why Oprah runs a magazine and I am finishing a PhD.

God bless bullet journals.  Kept by brilliantly organized women who color code their days, tasks, and grocery lists.  But something about gauging every task I complete or don't complete with a color-coded chart for every minute of every day seems daunting and depressing.  There are some people who are really good at using every minute wisely.  I am not one of those people.  I thrive on surfing deadlines just as the wave is about to crash to shore.  Nothing is more pleasing than pawing at a project like a cat does to a mouse.   Maybe it is the secret to scores of publications and managing my career, but trying to document, measure, and quantify all of my activities seems like it would take more work than actually doing them.  Plus, why does anything efficient have to be a "bullet-something" these days?  Last year, it was bullet-proof coffee, which was supposed to help you run like a champ and lose a ton of weight.  This year, we are all fatter having sustained a diet of drinking butter and chronicling our fitness schedules in bullet journals.

I was intrigued, however, with this concept:

I found this on Pinterest, which was posted from Tumblr, which apparently came from Planet Millie, although the original page cannot be retrieved.  I am at least trying to give credit here.

This is a weekly Moleskine planner.  I searched high and low for this planner.  Moleskine is out of stock.  Amazon is mostly out of stock, albeit third-party sellers overcharging.  According to my local Barnes and Nobles (multiple), they were out of stock too, although they had the best too-good-to-be-true price.  I attempted to reserve two copies at two locations and was told they were out of stock despite the website indicating they were in stock.  Apparently, everyone and their mother purchased this journal promptly in November and it allegedly contains the secret of life.

In some sort of delayed Christmas miracle, I received a text from one of those vendors saying, "Just kidding, we got one for you."  So it will be mine.

But now, what will I do with it?  At this point, I have a large Moleskine for general dissertation notes, another one for methodology, and a third one for topic specific notes.  Perhaps the planner can be like Millie's charting my personal life with a splash of the personal, along with daily tracking of my $$ (not pounds sterling silver) and the weather.  

I always carry a black Moleskine with me which is a hodge podge of grocery lists, things I like, phone numbers, and scraps of paper.  It is mostly practical but I keep them because they say something about the time I keep them:  Places I go, what I pack for a vacation, my diet for that time, deadlines, songs I like.  But it is messy and disheveled.  My planner won't be as vibrant and playful as Millie's or organized like the bullet journal, but it will tell a story.  

My story this week is preparing for my conference.  I need to finish writing the paper. . .  I also need to reach out to a law school for more data and materials.  But I am not sure what to ask for or if this task is feasible to complete before the presentation.  I am also a little sheepish to explain to this librarian that all of his kindness last summer preparing materials cannot be used because I changed my topic.  I mostly don't want to look like a flake.  

I also need to write my methodology section.  I am looking forward to this, but afraid I am going to miss or forget something.  I kind of need fear to step aside and a serious dose of energy from a good night's sleep.