Listen. If you want to get a jump on the winter holidays now with decorations and baking, I say go ahead. Cheer is sorely lacking and I see no reason to delay it.
Brain fog has returned but I got the kid to sit next to me instead of on me and squeezed in 5+ pages of Abigail DeKosnik’s ROGUE ARCHIVES. Yay me!
Kimberly problems: when your brain fog lifts enough for you to read scholarship but you can’t go get your book stand because your kid is sitting on you.
What do you think are my areas of expertise?
The burnout is real.
From September 8 to October 2, I attended a virtual dissertation writing boot camp.
I have childcare each day from 1 pm to 6 pm. I have standing meetings on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 2. The Bootcamp ran from 2 - 5 each day that week, so my Tuesday and Wednesday meetings were moved back to 1. I had no time between my mother-in-law’s arrival and my meetings to do any getting set up. On the other days, I spent that first hour transitioning my kid and getting everything I needed together for the boot camp.
Every day that week at 5 I was too exhausted to take advantage of that last hour of childcare for anything but rest.
I wrote an entire chapter of my dissertation that week; it was probably about 25 pages by the time I was done.
At the end of the boot camp, we talked about what we were going to do to carry our momentum forward. I blathered about my little routines to help me settle in at the beginning of my workday.
I took a week off from dissertating after the boot camp. I did none of my routines.
The following week, I spent most of the week at the Fan Studies Network North America conference, which was amazing. But the schedule was such that, again, I didn’t really do any of my routines.
The week after that, I filled in the remaining gaps in the three dissertation chapters I had written. This was not heavy work, and it’s a good thing.
I told myself I was going to write my discussion chapter as part of NaNoWriMo, but as we all know, the US election was on November 3 (not just presidential; I was concerned about down-ballot races too, esp. NC senate). And then there were days of waiting. Who could get work done during that time?
Not me. Not on my dissertation, anyway. (Throughout all of this I have continued doing work for my assistantship.)
Over the weekend I thought to myself, “Monday will be the day. Monday will be the day that I get back into my routines.”
Reader, I did not get back into my routines Monday.
I didn’t on Tuesday, either.
Only today did I move in that direction: I meditated for 3 minutes with Headspace. I wrote a couple of “morning” pages (but not a full 3). I did a Tarot card pull.
I got The Star. It was the right card for today.
I started generating ideas for a process for creating my discussion chapter.
It feels silly to say. But that’s where I am.
Image is a detail of the 10 of Wands from the product image for the Wayhome Tarot at the Everyday Magic website. It’s a great deck. I highly recommend it.
The more I go nowhere and do nothing, the more money I spend on books… Which is why I’ll probably be taking advantage of the Duke University Press sale to buy this book about why Buffy the Vampire Slayer is still a thing even though it’s been off-the-air for 17 yrs.
All 3 Roger Rabbit shorts are on Disney+, this is not a drill.
Everything hurts but it’s too hot to wear my “everything hurts” sweatshirt: the Kimberly Hirsh story
Current status: counting “figuring out which book will tell me how to write my discussion chapter” as my dissertation activity for the day. (It’s Making Sense of Qualitative Data by Amanda Coffey & Paul Atkinson.)
Bunnies and fishes at For Garden’s Sake.
