Dissertating during a pandemic is not easy. Maintaining concentration is a real challenge. Before the pandemic, my chronic illness allowed me about 2 good hours a day to do creative work, and any other work time I allotted to more rote/administrative tasks.

Now I have the capacity for 1 task, regardless of whether it’s creative or administrative, and 1 meeting. That’s it. If I do those things, my brain insists it is time for sleep, Star Trek, or fiction reading. And often it can’t even handle fiction reading, so I then do this Star Trek/sleep combo.

I don’t sleep well at night. Even on nights when I don’t do a 3 am doomscroll and instead get a good chunk of sleep, I still wake up feeling like I could sleep for the rest of time if only my body would actually, you know, sleep. (I took Benadryl and slept until 10 am one weekend in recent memory and that was amazing but the rested feeling was 100% gone by the next day.)

I rarely have the energy to be “on” for my kid. We read, I remind him of all the possibilities he has (Clay! Legos! Blocks! Sandpaper letters! Pretend cooking! Real cooking! Coloring! Painting! Magnatiles! Action figures! A bunch of tiny animals!), he chooses one of those and plays independently while I crochet or try to read about either unschooling or Reader’s Advisory. We watch Sesame Street and Wild Kratts. Sometimes we play Animal Moves, in which I call out the names of random animals and he moves like them. (I use a random animal generator because I can’t even think of the names of more than probably 7 animals.)

I’m a person who likes to appear cheerful. I’m a person whose nature it is to care about things.

Right now, I want my dissertation to be done, I want to sleep, and I want to read fiction and then talk to people about what I’m reading and what they’re reading. I want to crochet but not to knit because knitting requires brain power since I keep having to re-learn it and my fingers are always slipping.

Sometimes I put on Bob Ross, if I have a migraine.

And I often have a migraine, waxing and waning in intensity.

I am living this pandemic on the absolute easiest setting, with a flexible schedule, two incomes even though mine is right at the cost of living for 1 person, the ability to pick food up curbside and do none of my own shopping, deeply discounted childcare from my mother-in-law, and the ability to communicate with friends and sometimes even visit outdoors with local family.

And I am exhausted.

I can’t imagine how hard this must be for people in worse circumstances than mine.

How are you holding up? Are you holding up? I have a headache today. I really want to write about ideas: craft as healing, being a parent and being other things too, what we mean when we talk about information literacy. My brain though can’t gather all the floaty fragmentary bits of thoughts about these ideas that are whirring through my mind, so I guess I’ll write about them later.

I got my car inspected and its 60K maintenance done. It feels nice to have a car that should be in good shape for another 30K miles. The guy who helped me was the same guy who helped me the last time I took my car in, a year ago, and he recognized me, even with my mask on. He said he remembered my eyes.

So now I think I have memorable eyes.

Last night I had a desire to listen to Michael Crawford sing some distinctly un-Phantom of the Opera songs. I don’t know why. He always sounds ghostly to me, so it’s really funny to hear him do brassy songs in a ghost voice. It makes me happy. The most hilarious is probably The Power of Love, but that’s not on Spotify so last night I went with Any Dream Will Do. Hilarious! They should rename the show Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor DreamGHOST when Michael Crawford sings it.

Have you ever noticed that Michael Crawford doesn’t do a lot of Sondheim? He plays Hero in the movie of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum but on his solo albums there’s not much Sondheim. Maybe a little. (Only vaguely related, another role Crawford had in his early career was Cornelius in Hello, Dolly! and the story of how he got that job is hilarious.)

I’ve been thinking lately about how to be a theater person again, because I miss it and it was a huge part of my identity until the college theater scene kind of beat it out of me. (I made the mistake of aligning myself with the far too serious drama department kids instead of the more fun non-majors putting up their own shows.)

There’s a Theater & Drama Crash Course and it was nice looking through the titles of the videos to realize how much I remember from my BA in dramatic art. I might watch some of those videos and revisit that stuff.

Now is, of course, a terrible time to get back into theater; there’s not much live stuff going on and I’m not really in a position to do virtual shows because my kid could walk in at any minute.

But there are other angles I can approach it from; play reading, playwriting, watching recorded productions, theater history… We’ll see where I go with it.

Anyway, back to my first question.

How are you holding up?

I kind of want to put the person back in my personal website. Not that it isn’t personal - especially my short little notes. But I’ve been thinking about this like it was A Blog, not My Blog, and it’s not a great feeling. So I do have this sort of voice in my head for Important Blog PostsTM with titles like

“My kid isn’t going to be at my dissertation defense and that makes me sad”

or

“Transformations and transitions: How my thinking is changing.”

And these are interesting things that I do want to talk about, but I don’t need to use an authoritative voice to talk about them.

Back in December I set out to get back to a freer form of blogging and then December exploded on my face in a mess that is only now really beginning to be cleaned up.

I’m hoping to change that now.

What are you up to today? I went to a SILS virtual craft circle, which was great; I’m going to have two of those a week in my life now, on Thursdays and Fridays, and I think it’s very good.

I showed my kid the first ever episode of Sesame Street. (It’s on HBO Max.) Bob was so young in 1969, y’all! Of course, many people were - my parents were teens. It’s a really solid pilot; there are some good gags. I think it’s easy to forget how funny Sesame Street can be if you haven’t watched it in a while, but it’s really good. I’ve blogged before about how it makes a great comedy school, and that was true even in the pilot.

I’ve had a migraine that waxes and wanes for over a week now. It’s not good. I think it’s a hormonal thing.

There are too many books to read.

I think that’s enough stream of consciousness for now.

And now to finish, a GIF that features two of my imaginary friends: Kermit the Frog and Levar Burton.

via GIPHY

It’s been two weeks and a day since my grandmother died, and I don’t feel like doing anything.

When I posted about her death, I didn’t mention the three weeks of emotional trauma leading up to it. She was rushed to the hospital with symptoms of internal bleeding on 12/12, beginning a rollercoaster of her being unresponsive, showing small signs of consciousness, being taken off a ventilator and able to breathe on her own, being able to talk, showing signs of significant memory loss, and being moved to hospice. Throughout all of that, I played the role of the emotional support eldest daughter, with my mom calling me almost every day, sometimes twice a day, to update my sister and myself (on a three-way call) and talk through her feelings. She was unable to go to Florida to help; her brother had to manage the whole thing alone, and for a while was her only point of communication about my grandmother’s condition. She was often confused about my grandmother’s state. It was weeks of misery capped off by losing her mother.

And, I have to remind myself when I wonder why I feel so glum, losing my grandmother, who was very important to me even if I didn’t see or talk to her often.

I’d had big plans for the first couple of weeks of January, and I found myself unable to actually do any of them. I was finally beginning to feel like maybe next week (this week now? depends on if your week starts on Sunday or Monday) I could dig myself out of this funk enough to get some work done.

And then on Friday, my mom asked my sister and myself to look over her eulogy. It was beautiful, it needed no changes, and I hope that at the graveside service this afternoon, she gets to deliver it.

Ah, yes. The graveside service, taking place in Kodak, TN, where the coronavirus metrics show community transmission is about 4 times worse there than here. So I didn’t go.

I’ve been to three other funerals at that cemetery.

I hate that I’m not at this one, but I would hate getting sick more.

Communicating about my decision not to go was its own source of trauma.

So I probably shouldn’t be mystified by the fact that I don’t feel like doing anything.

I don’t want to write about research or pop culture or even books. I don’t really want to read. I don’t want to watch new things (though I did watch WandaVision).

All I want to do is watch Star Trek: The Next Generation and crochet. That’s it. One stitch at a time, building a beautiful lace shawl, as I sit with these friends who have been with me since I was six years old and watch them behave in all the ways I know they will.

I’ve been tormenting myself for at least a year with the thought of what comes next after I graduate. I was chugging along really nicely on my dissertation. I suspect I’ll be stalled out on it for another week or so. I hope it won’t impact my timeline too much.

I’ve been thinking that what comes next is probably creating my own consulting business. But I realized that as long as my child is home from school, I probably can’t drum up enough work to cover the cost of paying for extra care for him. So the most economically sound thing to do, then, is to set aside consulting work for later, and double down on momming now.

I talked to W. about this and he said,

“I would expect you to just think of yourself as an educator, then.”

This was a good identity perspective for a few reasons. One, it freed me from the idea that I would need to be a full-on homemaker, which I certainly won’t have the energy to do if I’m also educating M. (My mother-in-law has been caring for him in the afternoons at a rate that is beyond a bargain, but even that rate isn’t cheap enough if I’m bring in no income.)

His school has gone fully remote, so that he’s not the only kid or one of two who is remote, which is nice, but it actually requires more hands-on time for me than just letting him putter about the playroom all morning. It’s really good, though.

So. Fine. I’ll be a consultant without contracts. I’ll squeeze my me-time in around his schedule, crocheting while he unschools or reading after he goes to sleep.

And maybe in a week or two, I’ll feel like writing again. I hope so. But I think right now I need to give myself permission to be in this spot of doing nothing, because grief deserves time. And it’s okay to still be grieving my grandmother, who has been in my life for almost 40 years, after two weeks.

I just re-read my 2019 Year-in-Review & 2020 Word of the Year blog post, published a little over a year ago. When I look at all the stuff I got done in 2019, all the places I went, all the people I spent time with, I am struck by how different 2020 has been. We all know it, but I’ve actually become inured to it. And then I read something like this. Cons. Travel. Flotation therapy. All things I haven’t done in 2020.

Because, you know, global pandemic.

But I still did some stuff in 2020!

• Pre-pandemic, I defended my dissertation proposal.
• I revised that proposal and submitted it for IRB review.
• I then changed my dissertation scope twice.
• I collected all the data for my dissertation.
• I analyzed all the data for my dissertation.
• I drafted my dissertation. (All of that was accomplished in 10 months, which is pretty impressive.)
• I conducted 3 interviews for my research assistantship.
• I analyzed 14 interview transcripts for my research assistantship.
• I managed having the house painted.
• I had plumbers out at least 3 times. (Probably need to get on a service plan.)
• I presented a virtual poster at Fan Studies Network North America.
• I learned about and tried different methods of stress relief.
• I planned a special private birthday video chat storytime for M’s birthday with his favorite storier, Mr. Jim.
• I managed virtual preschool/unschooling from mid-March to mid-December. (Cutting the kid & myself a break during his school’s break time.)
• I kept going.

My word of the year for 2020 was FULL, specifically filling my well and being my full self. I think I’ve succeeded brilliantly, so yay for that. I also wanted to read for pleasure, play video games, and pursue my core desired feelings of ease, creativity, and connection. I’ve done all that stuff, too! So even though 2020 changed a LOT of my plans, I still did what I hoped to do. That’s pretty cool.

One of the things I realized this year was that daily projects don’t suit me, for a variety of reasons. I need a little more flexibility. So I’m giving myself permission to do daily projects my way - which is to say, to focus on increasing how much I do the thing, rather than being sure I do it daily. So I read more poetry this year than ever before, but I didn’t read a poetry book a day every day in August. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.

I’m also realizing that natural cycles are the best way for me, personally, to measure time. So I’m setting goals and planning in quarters instead, specifically Wheel-of-the-Year-style quarters. So from December 21 to March 21, my goal is to get my dissertation done and, ideally, defended. (The defense may be closer to the end of March, and that’s fine.) I don’t know what comes next after that, and that’s okay.

And I’m selecting a word of the quarter, which may turn into a word of the year but I often find that by mid-March, a new word has revealed itself. My word for the first quarter of 2020 is PLAY, which I’m using in its broadest possible sense. So I’m going to try learning to play some of the musical instruments I have around the house, playing more games, trying new art forms, and deliberately engaging in purposeless activity.

I hope you find a way to have fun, regardless of what 2021 brings.

Image Caption: This is what the best days at pandemic preschool look like for us: different kids on screen together, all pursuing work that lights them up. (M. is in the foreground and his classmates are actually hidden behind their work.)

via @Miraz

Humans Used to Sleep in Two Shifts, And Maybe We Should Start It Again sciencealert.com

Archiving...

This piece by Sarah Lonsdale describes the kind of literary friendship I fantasize about having. Who wants to be my literary bff?

How Literary Female Friendships Shaped the Fiction Market ‹ Literary Hub lithub.com

Read: lithub.com

Highlights & Notes

Naomi Royde-Smith was an astute literary editor of the Saturday Westminster and brought Macaulay, an awkward “innocent from the Cam” as she described herself, into her circle of friends, who seemed to Macaulay “to be more sparklingly alive than any in my home world.”

Please. Bring me into your literary circle.

Macaulay would often stay in her friend’s Knightsbridge home where they held soirées for authors and journalists to bolster each other’s standing and forge mutually supportive networks.

We can host soirées. I’ll set up the video chat.

Tell me about your favorite literary friendships and relationships! I’m especially fond of the Shelleys, who wrote collaborative diaries. ♥️

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, which has nothing to do with any gift-giving related holidays and everything to do with end-of-year media lists, especially end-of-year book lists. My favorite is the NPR Book Concierge, though I’m meaning to check out some others, too.

I thought I’d review my year in reading. I felt like I read a lot this year, but it turned out to be really different than I remembered. You can always check out my reading stuff in the Books category or on my Reading page, but here’s what I thought was worth highlighting.

I finished 10 fiction books this year, all of them novels. I got really into Dark Academia, so of course I read The Secret History. If We Were Villains, Bunny, and Ninth House are all in my TBR pile (literally, I have all three of them in the house right now). I also joined an Instagram reading group via my Dark Academia Insta (DAinsta?Dinsta?) and that led me to read or re-read some classics: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. I’m currently partway through The Historian, but it’s ambitious to think I’ll finish it this year.

Here are my favorite fiction books I read this year:

The Starless Sea: Erin Morganstern always creates the most immersive settings for her books. I kind of want to live in this one.

The Power: Naomi Alderman’s near-and-distant-future novel of women who can literally electrify other people blew my mind.

Legendborn: This one is a good read for anybody, but has special meaning if you’re familiar with UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus. It makes campus feel magic and reckons with the University’s history at the same time.

But my very favorite, thought about re-reading immediately, crow-it-to-everybody book that I read this year is Mexican Gothic. I love it so much but I can’t really bring myself to write a good review or synopsis. It is a classic Gothic novel, but moves the setting from Victorian England to 1950s Mexico. It still has an old English manse, mind you. It’s just an English house built in Mexico. It scratches every Gothic itch I have ever had, adds a new criticism of colonialism (refreshing in the world of Jane Eyre and The Secret Garden), and the revealed secret is fascinating and horrifying. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

I read 12 non-fiction books this year. Of these, two really stood out for me: Kelly J. Baker’s Grace Period, which I’ve written about before, and Sarah Kendzior’s Hiding in Plain Sight, which is such an important read. I knew it would be important; I didn’t know it would also be beautiful.

I participated in The Sealey Challenge and managed to read a poetry book or chapbook a day for the first couple of weeks in August. This was a great reminder that I actually quite like poetry. I read 16 poetry books; my favorites of these were Electric Arches, Wolf Daughter, and _[re]construction of the Necromancer_.

I’ve read about 25 comic book single issues this year (18 of those in the past couple of days!) and expect to read several more over the next 10 days. Most of these have been X-Men books, a combination of some classic Claremont stuff with my fave Kitty Pryde’s early appearances, and the recent Dawn of X interrelated series. I can’t pick a favorite.

Lastly, I’ve read a lot of picture books, chapter books, and comics for young readers with my kid. I haven’t been tracking this kind of reading much this year, though I hope to more next year. That said, I do have a couple of favorites to recommend: Interstellar Cinderella and the Narwhal and Jelly series. Interstellar Cinderella is basically about what it would be like if Cinderella were really Kaylee from Firefly with a really cute twist on happily ever after, and Narwhal and Jelly is basically a more oceanic and less pastoral Frog and Toad: Narwhal is THE UNICORN OF THE SEA! and Jelly is worried a lot.

I did read some fanfic this year, but not a lot. My favorites were both X-Men: First Class fics: Everything About It Is a Love Song and table for three. What can I say? I love Prof. X and Magneto, who are not unlike Frog and Toad in their own way.

And speaking of Frog and Toad, the best thing I read online this year was probably Jenny Egerdie’s Frog and Toad Are Self-Quarantined Friends. But you can see a lot more of what I read online (but not everything) in the Links category, if you’re interested.

What did you read this year? If it was a hard year for reading for you, what did you do instead?

I’m really on a break now - had my last business-ish meeting yesterday, no Zoom calls scheduled through the new year. So I’m going to write some holiday/end-of-year blog posts.

First up, inspired by this tweet, a list of my most memorable Christmas presents from childhood.

1. A tape recorder. When I was around 5, Santa left a beautiful red tape recorder under the tree for me. I hadn’t asked for it; I’m not sure I even knew such a thing existed. But it rapidly became my favorite thing. I took it to church for the Christmas morning to show off; I told people that it was just what I wanted even though I didn’t know I wanted it. For years I used that tape recorder to record imaginary radio shows or, as we would call them now, podcasts. I also used it to record my baby sister singing “La Bamba,” which was priceless.

2. A globe. I loved that globe. I can’t tell you why. I just remember spinning it and touching the raised mountain ranges and feeling like some new knowledge had suddenly become accessible to me. I was 7 or 8 for this one.

3. A telescope. I never quite got it working right, but this was like an exponential increase in the feeling I felt when I got the globe. I have been interested in astronomy ever since. Probably got this one when I was 9.

So there you have it, my most memorable Christmas gifts from childhood. Or, if you prefer, evidence that I have always been this nerdy and into learning.

Have a good weekend! I’ll be back next week with thoughts on some holiday movies and my year in books.

I sent off the introduction chapter for my dissertation to my advisor a few minutes ago. I also decided to do a total page and word count for the whole thing. And while I was doing that I made the mistake of reading the comments on the methods chapter. Which are good and helpful comments and not that dramatic, but IMPOSTOR SYNDROME, am I right?

Mostly what I’m dealing with is that both of the committee members who have looked at that chapter were like “This theoretical framework part needs it’s own chapter.” It won’t actually be creating a whole chapter from scratch, but it does feel a little like it will. And so my jerk brain is like, “Why didn’t you write that? Why haven’t you done that already? Why didn’t that occur to you? UGH. Your dissertation is frivolous, thin, unimportant, has nothing to contribute, and is basically just you dicking around. You’ll graduate probably because you have a kind committee but what subpar work.”

My brain doesn’t seem to know we’re in a pandemic.

Before I go on, here are the stats: in its current iteration, my dissertation is 155 pages and 31,084 words. I started data collection in April. I went from initiating data collection to a finished draft in 6 months, working on it for half-days, while caring for my child in the morning and writing in the afternoons.

This is no small achievement, regardless of the contribution my research makes to the field.

And I simultaneously worked on my assistantship, which involved designing a semistructured interview protocol, conducting 3 interviews, and coding 14 interviews.

I had planned to start my data collection earlier. I had planned to be writing close to full-time hours, because I had expected to get a dissertation fellowship, making this a non-service year. Things have gone very differently than I planned, and I have a first draft of my dissertation to show anyway.

I may kick off my revisions with a dissertation bootcamp Jan 11 - 15. We’ll see.

–

Something that only occurred to me yesterday, although of course it’s been going on the whole time I’ve been a mother, is that I hold my child’s emotions in my body. So when my kid sobs three or four times in one morning and throws a couple of tantrums, I can’t just hand him off to my mother-in-law and then sit down to work. My body just won’t allow it.

Giving myself permission to recognize the impact my kid’s emotions have on my body is something I sorely needed, and I really hope it will help me moving forward.

Okay. Gonna have lunch and then maybe go to Bean Traders to get some curbside pickup “I did it!” treats.