All's Quiet on the Blogging Front...

Is there anyone academically-affiliated that doesn't hate this time of year? I see both students and professors shuffling around campus in a burned-out daze, and I'm right there with them. Everyone is stumbling around with armfuls of books, looking despondent and exhausted, hardly noticing the beautiful weather that's finally graced us with its presence. Even the frat boys are hunched over their laptops in the library, looking sober and focused. It's really a depressing time to be on campus. If you aren't already worn down by your own work, seeing even the most cheerful students repeatedly slamming their faces into a pile of nasty books will sure do it for you. It passes eventually, though, and midway through next week half of these kids will have already flown home for the summer.

Today is the last day of classes. It's also the last concert of the year, and I unfortunately volunteered to perform on it. Gotta go out with a bang, I guess, filling this last day with as much work as possible. Time to move into serious paper crunching mode.

First up to bat is my final paper for Narrative & Time. I've decided to write about the comic series Promethea, written by Alan Moore and penciled by J.H. Williams. Specifically, I've decided to go all hardcore comic scholar and analyze Williams' panel structure as a method of portraying temporal and spatial instability. This one will be somewhat difficult, as most of the resources I need are already checked out of the library with no hopes of recalling them, but I think I have enough information to lay a firm groundwork and overlay it with lots of my own analysis. It's due on May 4th, but the professor has begged us to get them done as early as possible. My goal is to finish by May 1st or 2nd, leaving time for...

...paper number two, the one for my Spectralism class, and the one that is likely to kill me in my sleep and drink my blood. The good news is that all of my interlibrary loans have finally arrived! Let there be confetti and ponies on this happy occasion! The bad news is that I have no thesis statement for this paper yet. I have a topic, resources, and examples, but no argument to make yet. My professor assures me that as I do my analysis, an argument will present itself to me. I sure freaking hope so. The analysis will take long enough by itself without me agonizing for three days over what to write. This paper is longer and more in depth than the previous paper, so once I start writing I need to churn it out fast.

I'm so ready to write 40 amazing pages of analysis in the next two weeks. And grade a bunch of final projects for the Music & Computers class. And move to a new house halfway across town.

Bring on the caffeine!

Library Woes: ILLs and Recalls

The library means so many things to grad students. It's a place to scour shelves for dusty old books (50 of which you will check out, haul home, and not return for three years). A place to work for long hours (especially if the library assigns carrels to grad students). A place to eat (since you never actually leave). A place to sleep (made easier if you have a carrel). A place to socialize (because when do you ever see your fellow grad students otherwise?). A place to hide from annoying students (because if there's one place you know they won't be, it's in the library working).

Of course, the library serves two other important functions. Stealing the little bit of hard-earned money each grad student possesses, and accepting sacrifices of small animals on behalf of the interlibrary loan gods.

I don't think there's a single grad student in the world that ends a school year without library fines. Those who are in their comps year often amass fines in excess of $100. The 'recall' function is either evil or a lifesaver, depending which side of the recall button you're on. If you're working on a paper and really need a book someone has checked out, it's amazing, assuming the other person actually returns the book in a timely fashion (or at all). If you're in the thick of your comps and someone recalls one of the key books for your topic, you're pretty much boned. There's no way you can return the book, so you rack up $1/day fines until you make sure you don't have to retake the exams. As if we don't spend enough money on books we actually own, we have to pay a ridiculous amount for books we don't even get to keep. Fantastic.

My current predicament has me on my knees before the shrine of the interlibrary loan gods, praying for swiftness of delivery. This problem is partially the fault of the professors. If they would assign papers more than 2-3 weeks in advance, I would have plenty of time to order the music scores and books I need and have them arrive in enough time to be useful. Every day, I refresh my 'library requests' queue to see if there's been a status update, and every day the words "request sent" stare back at me. This is way worse than tracking a package. Yes, I always worry about $100 worth of Amazon orders going missing, but I worry more about failing a class due to lack of paper resources and being expelled from the program, thus derailing my life for the next 5+ years. Melodramatic? Yes. Yes it is. But it's hard to not see the apocalypse approaching when the semester is ending and you still don't have the score for the piece you're suppose to have analyzed in the next three days. Come on, guys, I even told you which university within 50 miles has the item listed as 'on the shelf'! You can do it, I believe in you!

I think it's time to pray harder. Is ramen, pizza, and beer an acceptable offering for library gods? Somehow I think burning books in their honor would be offensive. 

Can I Write My Paper About Space Monkeys?

Some very hard-working people have inspired me to stop feeling sorry for myself and just get to work. When I talk to my grad student friends I know from other departments, they sound like I did in undergrad. They talk about how swamped with work they are, how much effort they're putting in, but in the end everything gets done and it's all good work. Right now, they're all going nuts with the end of the semester looming, frantically researching their final papers and climbing toward that staggering page count. I've been having the opposite problem since I got here; since I've been so unhappy with everything they're forcing me to do here that it's killed my motivation. They work so hard, but I just don't care anymore. Without motivation, and without a topic to care about, I find myself freaking out at the last minute trying to churn out some bullshit, and it ends up being subpar work that I'm not proud of. I used to enjoy (as much as anyone can enjoy) writing academic papers for two reasons: I liked the research phase of collecting tons of books and learning a bunch of new stuff, and I liked the "job well done" feeling that came with writing a paper and knowing I did the best I could. I liked being able to go back, read a paper, and be proud of the conclusions I had drawn. Now, I feel like I can't make myself work, no matter what I do.

Well, I'm just going to try harder now. I have two final papers coming up. One of them I know I can enjoy writing, because I have three topics in mind that I can get into. That paper, of course, is for my English class. If not for that class, I might have gone crazy and left by now. Of course, it only has to be 10 pages. Figures that the one I care about is the short one. My other paper has to be 20-40 pages, and it's going to be really hard to find a topic that I give a damn about that will actually fit the class. For the most part, I've found the music we're studying to be pretty painful to listen to. The thought of listening to it enough times to write a 20+ page analysis of it makes me sad inside. I have a meeting today with that professor to brainstorm paper topics, and he's the only professor I've felt comfortable talking to about my give-a-shit issues, so he seems on board for helping me find a topic I care about. I hope we can come up with something without me having to tell him that I hate the music he's devoted his life to studying. I really want to do a good job with this paper, if for no other reason than to prove to myself that I still have the ability to work hard. If I find a topic I can really get into, then I'd love to use this paper for the big paper I have to turn in at the end of year two to prove that I can write like an academic. That paper is apparently a really big deal, so most people try to write it as part of a class so it goes through lots of editing. If nothing else, that idea serves as some extra motivation. Less work further down the road? Yes, please. In fact, it's time for that meeting right now. Here's hoping it's not painful.

Something Smells Like Burning...

I took this weekend to do some reading for pleasure, rather than seeing just how close I could get a match to the pages of Bakhtin's "The Dialogic Imagination" without setting the pages on fire. I always forget how much my favorite pastime relaxes me (the reading, not the fire). It's like a 'reset' button on my brain, but not one of the ones you have to push by shoving a paperclip into it. That's more what school feels like. I read some comics, immersed myself in a young adult fantasy series by one of my favored authors, and scored some great deals for future reading at the used book store. As usual, this has lead to me spending way too much time managing my Shelfari page, but even that has a certain relaxation factor to it. I should require myself to read at least one book for fun each month. When the school year hits, I tend to stop reading anything fun that isn't fanfiction. Allowing myself one novel per month would likely go a long way toward alleviating some stress. The only problem is stopping once I start! I've blown through three short novels in the past few days, and my Kermode reading for English is starting to get jealous. Maybe I'll see how flammable it is after class today.

So, not that I'm counting or anything...but the last day of classes is only 21 days away. The last day of exams is May 8th, but I keep forgetting that this university is huge, and thus has an exam period of almost two weeks, most of which has nothing to do with me. My undergrad university took about five days, and two of those days the campus was nearly empty. So, freedom and sanity are far closer than I originally thought, and I'm feeling a bit more hopeful about my chances of finishing this semester alive. If someone takes the matches away, I might even make it to the end without burning any particularly nasty theory texts.

I think I'm going to buy one of those giant desk calendars so I can draw large, satisfying X marks over each day that passes. Maybe using a razor blade. We'll see what kind of week I have.

Persistence = Beer

For the sake of some levity around here:

"Once upon a time there was a student who wrote a dissertation. At the end of his rope and convinced his committee didn't care about the damn thing anyway, he took a chance.

A little ways in, he wrote in the middle of one paragraph, "If you're still reading this, I'll buy you a beer."

A bit later, he did it again. "If you've made it this far, I'll buy you a whole six-pack," he wrote.

Further on, he decided, what the hell. "If you're actually still reading, I'll buy you an entire keg!" he added to the end of one particularly intricate argument.

When he got to his defense, his advisor chuckled, clapping him on the back. "You, my boy, owe me a six-pack!" he said with a knowing wink."

It would be even funnier if it weren't so true for so many people! Times like this I'm glad my dissertation 80% project/20% writing instead of slogging out 200+ pages of head trauma. Much love to the person who posted this joke in one of the grad student communities I frequent.

Now, to make the subject line doubly meaningful, I promise to buy myself a beer when I'm done writing this paper.