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.