And Then They Ate Me...

That's how I feel about today. Students are cannibals.

Focusing on School? Who Does That?

Material objects fail to have a strong emotional connection for me. Except maybe Big Bear. I love that flattened gray bear to death. She's still with me.

Music though, music has such intense connections to my memories.

Regina Spektor's album Far, especially "Human of the Year," makes me think of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake because I was listening to it non-stop while I read said text and wrote a paper on it.

I have a lot of Chris music, right now. But I'll re-appropriate it. I've re-appropriated most of the John music. Except I heard a John song this morning.

Lovies, John. Thanks for making me feel loved even when you left. I'm glad you finally figured out a good way to live your life and escape your personal demons. Face. Deal. Helmet. You win.

So Much Procrastination to Get Done

I need to do the following things probably in the following order:
1. Grade Correspondence Portfolios
2. Write Postion Paper
3. Finish Research Log and Feasibility Studies
4. Grade Formal Reports
5. Grade Revisions
6. Pack

What am I doing right now? I'm procrasti-packing because most of the school related things don't sound like much fun. I also ate a juicy mango. It was so sweet and energizing.

For those interested in procrastinating, I also strongly recommend Game of Thrones from HBO. It's soooooooo good. Lindsey and I are hooked, and I think we're both ready to jump into reading the books too.

I best finish packing the kitchen and then head into the office to grade. :(

Write or Die

So I'm having trouble writing lately, and everyone keeps telling me to just write crap and  stop re-writing every sentence 8 times. I can fix it after it's there, but at least if I write it, I will have something to turn in.

I finally found a way.

My friend Maggie suggested I check out Write or Die. And I made some progress, which you can see below.



Woot! What I've written is horribly messy, but I got some ideas out, and I should be able to do some reorganizing and editing later. The content is finally being generated. I have 7 pages, so close to the halfway point!

There's nothing more motivating than a screen that flashes red and starts making noise when I am not making progress. It's also really nice to have a little timer and a word counter at the corner of the screen logging my progress.

Masters Defense Done

I kept 3 other people in a small room talking about my ideas for nearly an hour. That was nice. It was nice affirmation of the work I had done.

We talked about the process, where the project had been and where it is going. We also brought up holes in the argument, but that doesn't worry me. For the scope of my project, things had to be left out. The trick was I could address those concerns in discussion.

Now I have to write the paper for Indian Children's lit.

Blergh.

I'm gonna take a break for drinks and appetizers at Houlihan's first.

Masters Defense...dun, dun dun! And the Paper I did not write.

So I'm trying to prepare to defend my masters project today.

One thing I may have a hard time with is Paradise Lost. It's a long and complicated text, and I can't keep all the angels and demons/devils straight, especially because I don't think Philip Pullman created exact parallels in His Dark Materials. I don't think Paradise Lost is that relevant to my project persay, but Dr. Smith is a hardcore Milton fan. Also, a lot of our attitudes about the Fall of Adam and Eve come from the widely read Paradise Lost as much as they do from the bible, so actually it is relevant. Since there is no time to read Paradise Lost for a third time in my life, I am sparknoting this morning, but I must say, Sparknotes offers some biased evaluation on the text, though they make attempts to be fair.

I'm also worried that no one will ask me about rhetorical theory in my defense since it's not relevant to the lit and tech writing people on my committee. I'm fairly sure they will ask me what I would do with the project in the future. I think I'll talk about its potential for book length development, but emphasize that while a full book focusing on the rhetoric of His Dark Materials is possible and would be interesting, my focus would be on developing the theory and using more example texts to illustrate the potential of the theory. That way I can draw in more Burke and what I did with Abby's paper last spring.

I'm nervous.

I also still need to write the paper that was due yesterday but that I had the wrong date for. I'm a putz, and grad school is melting my brain, but I think I have mulled through the topic enough to crank out a paper. It's funny how after completing my masters project a 15 page, well-supported paper seems like nothing.

I'm going to talk about the Indian nationalist movement to unify India through mapping the Mother Goddess over the nation of India and how that made India into a specifically Hindi nation, creating oppression for Muslim Indians and others.

Then I'm going to talk about how The Smile of Vanuvati traces the Mother Goddess back through history in the form of the parallels of land and an iconic doll in order to connect the Mother Goddess to a more open history of India, which is more inclusive of Muslims and other historically present groups.

The Smile of Vanuvati is set in the state of Gujarat, which has seen intense violence between Hindi and Muslin groups even in recent years, so the book is a timely response to the tensions there.

Okay, back to defense mode. I need to shower and get dressed.

Graduate School OR Going Back to High School

So a friend posted the article "Paranoid? You Must Be a Grad Student" on facebook. I felt like it was the story of the past two years of my life.

During my time in grad school, I've felt like I have regressed. I was this confident mature career-minded person after a short stint in the working world. I could take on the world at that time. Now I'm paranoid socially, romantically, academically, etc. I find myself at the end of grad school an absolute mess. I haven't had this kind of anxiety since high school, and I'm about as emotionally stable as my high school self, which for me is a pretty low place to be.

The problem in high school was that I was a part of a very competative social circle that was obsessed with grades. Everything was a competition. One of the major irritants I remember in high school was taking physics early in the day when all my friends had it in the afternoon. They would ask me about the test during lunch and then act like they were smarter than me when their test scores came back higher. It still bugs me because they had an advantage, which I gave them. Grad school is the same sort of competative social environment.

When I get depressed, it usually has to do with school, and it's a vicious cycle. I have to not try so that I don't stress myself out about perfection, but I also have to do well because I would rather be dead than fail. I've managed to survive my classes with relative stability, but the actual masters project has been a nightmare for me, and it's come close to being my undoing on several occassions.

Why am I telling you all this? If I decide to get my PhD, you should shoot me or commit me. I would be better off working at Wal-mart.

On a positive note, just two more weeks. In two weeks, I can sleep on a regular schedule. I can cook healthier and fancier. I can spend my evenings reading whatever I want or crocheting and watching a movie. In two weeks I will have time to work out. I'm so close to this happy future, it's hard to focus on school, but in two weeks life will be magnificent (at least relatively speaking).