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.  

Meteorological Dissonance

I am waiting the Winter Solstice out.  I was thinking midnight was around the corner, but it is only 9:45 pm.  It feels like it has been dark all day.

The university is closed for a full two weeks, which seemed like a decadent luxury.  I structured in my head the industrial days I would have with reading, researching, writing, and dissertating punctuated with tea, wine, and SunDoc Club.  All of these hours are mine.

Two weeks really isn't a lot of time when two major holidays interrupt it in tandem with traveling.  Suddenly, I have like two days to myself, one of which was spent around getting a refrigerator repaired.

Because I loathe the holidays so much, I do most of my shopping online, but I dread shopping for groceries tomorrow and the accompanying traffic.  My goal is to hit up Trader Joe's while everyone else is sitting in their cubicle with their cup of joe.

Suddenly, I have no idea how to structure my time.  If I start reading, I get anxious and fidgety because I realize there is so much to do, and I am ready to start synthesizing.  If I cut straight to writing, I don't know what to write.  I also have a conference paper and presentation in t-minus three weeks.

So it would probably be a good idea to outline my goals.

1.  Finish reading the suggested American legal theory texts.  Levi's Introduction to Legal Reasoning is excruciatingly  dull and painful, so I am plowing through that tonight.

2.  Refine the research question.  I feel like I did this, but it doesn't sound fancy.

3.  Write up my methodology section.  I am still uneasy giving up my survey, but it adds an element of complexity that is unnecessary for my study, so I will pass until I receiving one of those large grants that everyone thinks they are going to land to write the book.

4.  Write the conference paper.  Because it is that easy.

Admittedly, I enjoyed pretending to read in my armchair earlier, but the morning felt incomplete.  There were no breakfast foods or even milk for coffee.  I dressed for winter, but it was over 60 degrees outside, so I felt stuffy.  I thought indulging in comfort food would make feel relaxed, but not so much.  Perhaps after a shower and pajamas, Levi will be appealing.

But I am not getting my hopes up.

Cacophony

I'm not shy about the fact I hate Christmas.  I will, however, attempt to be diplomatic when discussing my contempt in an effort not to crap on everyone else's parade, those who started counting down in September and started playing Christmas music Thanksgiving Day.  I am not sure why I practice this deference when Christmas is all about being all up in people's faces with the same songs played over and over and blinking red and green lights like a neon sign flashing, "Be happy!  Smile!  Be happy!  Smile!"  But I really love the Fourth of July and would feel resentment toward anyone who says they hate fireworks and popsicles (although let's be honest, nobody has said that-- ever).

But Christmas is not a happy holiday for everyone.  It fact, it downright sucks for some people.  Spouses still walk out, loved ones get sick, people die.  The tacky blinking lights simply reinforce those points in the most annoying and inconsiderate way.

So I choose not to participate.  I appreciate the kind cards, but I never have the mind or time to return the favor.  I enjoy opening gifts but honestly just look forward to spending time with my family for an all day meal.  I do not enjoy buying presents.  Nobody ever tells you what they want, which they think makes them modest, but really makes gift buying more complicated in an already complicated time of year with short days, long nights, cold weather, and craptacular traffic.  Just tell me what you want.  This is the singular reason everyone receives my gifts in the mail after Christmas:  I don't consult the oracle and place an order with Amazon until December 21st because it just really sneaks up out of nowhere.

I was going to try this year.  I was really going to ride it out.  But I said "screw it" last week and waved my white flag.  While everyone else was out at Target or the mall, I was asleep in my arm chair.  The whole point of longer nights is nature's way of saying, "Chill."

In all honesty, I just feel blah.  It is dark.  I have been working longer hours to make up for the university closing.  I resolved a major issue with my dissertation and it turned out just fine, but with a steep strain on my calm.  I am eager to move forward and the finish line is finally in sight; without a doubt this is going to be an exciting year.  But there are also a lot of question marks dangling ahead.  Kind of like this:

                               (I think the surprise behind block two is the one-up I need)

There is just too much noise.  So the other evening, when I decided that rather than run to Target to pick up toilet paper and cat food I would give way to my armchair again, I turned off my phone and deactivated my Facebook account.

I didn't feel much.  It was just one Donald Trump meme too many.  A newsfeed filled with gun-control swipes at one another.  Muslims, refugees, terrorists.  Speaking of terrorists, there were also the pregnancy announcements.  Everyone just literally had a baby.  I'm not joking.  Babies were sprouting alongside pumpkins this fall.  So I thought there would be reprieve from the awful photo clues that have now replaced inside scoop uterus close-ups.  But there they were, the big brother/big sister t-shirts, row of shoes with baby booties as the outlier, the strategic bonus stocking.  This time, it isn't Thing 1, but Thing 2 and Thing 3.  Then there was this meme that wouldn't go away:

Now I get it.  I will never understand the best thing ever because I am staying up all night burping a literature review.  

With the meme explaining my limited capacity for Christmas joy, I decided to enjoy my holiday break without people behind computers telling me how I, or any other person, should think. 

It isn't the kids.  They're great.  People should be happy about their children, marriage(s), home closings, and vacations.  I just cannot be bothered with it constant streamed to me.  The word for that chatter is cacophony.  

It is also a reminder that children make progress over the years.  They grow up.  They acquire a vocabulary.  They master fine motor skills.  The develop personalities.  If my dissertation was a four and a half year old, by now it would know how to tie its shoe laces, recite the alphabet, and spell its own name.  Instead, you end up with a massive paper on a research project you designed.  That may be turned into a published book with a university press.  If you're lucky.  

Nick Drake sings, "Time goes by from year to year, no one asks why I'm standing here."  People do ask.  When I try to put my topic or progress into words, they glaze.  

I wish you all the happiness in the world.  I just cannot look at your magnificent Christmas lights, new SUV, hint hint wink wink pregnancy announcement, and for hell's sake, it's engagement season.  

But I have a proposal to finish.  I am armpit deep in legal theory texts.  I am going to sleep in so much it is going to make me tired.  I am going to be traveling.  I might punctuate those activities with coloring and a book for fun.  

My life doesn't look shiny right now.  Neither does Bridget's.  Neither does Sadie's.   Frankly, I don't care if it makes me sound "bitter" (special shout out to a special family member who is especially concerned about my relationship status and cynical humor).  But it is on my terms.  I am making my path.  I will post the filtered photos when I am done.  

I really wish this could be a place to share my PhD journey, tips, and tricks.  Instead, it centers more on the periphery issues.  But anyone can buy any number of "how-to" classics available on completing a dissertation.  There is little coaching on how to navigate the induction as an "other" (in this case, me as a woman).  From approaching difficult conversations crab-like and negotiating salary by bringing a big purse to the meeting (true tip) to being told at a major conference where I presented that I am "too pretty to work on a PhD", the woman in the academy has a different obstacle course to navigate.  

Also, writing lighter blogs is like a warm up to a marathon.