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
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