Memoir
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Conspiracy and randomness
There are just some days when I swear the universe is conspiring against dissertation completion. All I wanted to do today was write.
In case you haven’t heard, and aren’t living in this vicinity, it is eleventy bazillion degrees here right now. Trust me, in these parts we know from hot, and it is H. O. T. hot. Really, it is the time of year when I realize I have no business living in this region, because while I can tolerate the heat during the day, without air conditioning I wouldn’t be able to sleep from May until October. So, it is record breakingly hot here right now, and last night at about 11:30pm when it was still well above sleeping temperatures, our power went out. After figuring out that it was a general outage, and not just our breakers, I found a place where I could get a cross breeze, grabbed the cushions from the couch and made myself a bed, where I tossed and turned until the power came back on, bringing with it fans and air conditioning.
Yesterday, a block from the relative safety of the parking deck at work I ran over a screw. Not just a little nail, but a screw and washer big enough that I could see them in the back tire. Fortunately, they wedged in their tightly enough to create a seal and keep the tire full all the way home. But I knew that wouldn’t last long, so I had to spend a good portion of my day hanging out at the dealership waiting for my tire to be fixed.
After not sleeping and hanging out at a car dealership (where I did get a little writing, and a little knitting done), I had to go grocery shopping, and put together dinner for tonight. Did I mention it’s hot? Dinner was some chicken salad that required a lot of chopping, and needed to be done early so it could chill.
Dinner was actually a fairly random collection of crap that proved amazingly filling for the small amount of it that we ate. Chicken salad, bagel chips, a little brie, some chipotle cheddar cubes, chilled cherries and blueberries, corn on the cob, and watermelon. Well, I told you it was random.
Yes, I could be writing, right now this minute, but instead I am going to go read. I did some good free writing at the dealership (just a sentence or two for nearly every paragraph to help me see the shape of the whole thing). Now, I have to go figure out what sources are going to help me flesh that out.
Anyway, I guess there is always tomorrow. Tomorrow. I will be able to get up early and write my little heart out!
Share Your Story – Planned Parenthood
This week in The Malarkey Bin I followed a link to this article about Why I Can’t Afford Not to Go to Planned Parenthood. It is a powerful, required reading post that also inspired me to tell my own Planned Parenthood story.
In a way my story is a success story. There was a clinic in my home town. It was accessible, and I didn’t have to negotiate protesters or strict security to get to my appointment. It was the early 90s, and the thought that there had been a time when women weren’t able to take control of their health care amazed me. Yes, I was more than a little naive … give an 18 year old a break.
According to Wikipedia in 2010 my hometown had a population of 16, 896 people. Sounds about right, I’d be willing to bet there were a few more when I was growing up, maybe around 18,000? The population isn’t as important as knowing that our town was poor. Built up around an industry that has been dying since before I was born, the town was small, without a lot of diversions for kids. Once you got your license the first thing you did was drive 50 miles east to the State Capital to start hanging out at the mall there, or 20 miles west to the beaches. We may have grown up in the twin shadows of Ted Bundy, he had allegedly tried to pick up a friend’s mom in a bar, and the Green River Killer, still active north and east of us, but I would argue we were the last of a generation of free range kids. From the moment I moved there when I was 10 I was walking all over town. Either 6 blocks from our apartment to the public library, or the longer mile to my elementary school every morning. Before my friends and I got our driver’s licenses, and even after, we would walk all over town.
So, while it wasn’t all terrible, for the purposes of this tale the best image to leave you with is this: when I first heard of the alleged Pregnancy Pact in Gloucester, Ma., the only thing that surprised me about the story was that it happened somewhere other than my home town. Even when I graduated, I’m pretty sure no one got out of our high school without knowing at least one person who had gotten pregnant before graduation. Before I got out of the town for good, the age at which girls were getting pregnant just seemed to be getting lower. My brother, sister, and I joke that the greatest accomplishment in our family was all three of us getting out of that place without having a kid before we were 18. We don’t make that joke at anyone’s expense, many of the young parents we know are some of the best parents we know, and when you are young in our home town there is not a lot to do outside the backseat of a car. If it weren’t for the Planned Parenthood clinic in our town, I don’t think I could even estimate the number of teen pregnancies we would have seen in my high school.
Right now, you are probably imagining a much different story than the mundane one I am about to tell. Although I’d contemplated it for a couple of years before, it wasn’t until I had graduated from high school that I visited our clinic. The funniest part about high school for me was that by the time I graduated I knew that at least twice rumors had spread that I was pregnant, and at least once there was a conflicting rumor that I was a lesbian. It was all amusing to me because I was pretty sure I was the only person I knew not sexually active.
What lead me to Planned Parenthood? I’d read that when a woman turned 18 she needed to have her first Pap Smear, so I made an appointment. I also wanted birth control pills to regulate my periods and alleviate my cramps. My cramps were so bad that I routinely took 3 – 4 Advil at a time just to get through the days that I had them. I was still working part time at a grocery store without health benefits. Planned Parenthood was the only place I could afford to go for standard health care. My story isn’t dramatic, but illustrates a point often lost in the current war on reproductive rights.
Planned Parenthood is essential to all aspects of women’s health care.
What is your Planned Parenthood story?
What I learned this week:
The last couple of weeks have been phenomenally busy at work, but it’s not like I didn’t know they would be. Much like all my instructor friends know the last few weeks of the semester mean spending all their time in grading jail, I know the first couple weeks of the semester mean spending all my time doing the “Come to the Writing Center” dog and pony show. The goal is that by the end of the 2nd and 3rd weeks of the semester someone (90% me) visits all the English 100 and 101 classes. Yes, Virginia, at a school with an undergraduate population twice as big as that of your home town, that is A LOT! You know what else it is? It is exhausting.
Yes, I do this every semester. Yes, I know it is coming. There just isn’t anyway to prepare for the amount of energy it takes to give a 10 minute monologue to different audiences 3 times an hour. In a way it is like grading jail, just front loaded.
Surprisingly, this post isn’t really about complaining. I know. Shocker. It’s about what I’ve come to realize, over the last two weeks.
- If I ever have a nervous break down it is going to happen in the middle of one of these visits. I’ll be in the middle of the “Here’s why you should use our service” spiel, and I’ll just throw up my hands and walk out. I may or may not mutter obscenities under my breath.
- This is the semester that the consultants put together a welcome video that we can shop around to hopefully lessen the number of human visits. I’ve given them no choice, and a deadline of April 15th.
- Oddly enough, when that happens I plan to use that time to start a classroom visit campaign to another set of classes. Have we discussed my masochistic nature? I’m pretty sure we have.
- If I ever finish the dissertation, and get my ‘real’ degree, I’m going to have some serious soul searching to do about whether or not this is the place for me.
- Also, I’m pretty sure you know you are a writer, when not writing/writing very little for two weeks gives you ulcers.
Really, all this week I’ve had stomach issues of one kind or another. Today they culminated in dull pain every time I ate. So, for the next week or so it is all bland food/and herbal tea for me. The caffeine headache ought to kick in tomorrow afternoon in the middle of a writing binge fest.
Slogging Through …
Well, it is the point of no return. I have to, absolutely, no room for error, must defend my dissertation in May.
All of that would mean that I have to you know, write my dissertation. The writing is … going, and I guess that is good enough. My momentum was really getting into swing, but then December hit. Suddenly, I couldn’t avoid having lunch with colleagues, and so my lunch time writing fell apart. On top of that, for various reasons, I have had to drive into work a little more often than normal, which means my bus writing has also been spotty.
Unbelievably there is a silver lining to all of this! The Cajun Princess, and Tech Oracle also plan to defend in May, so we are all in this boat together. The plan is to use this time to keep each other going.
To get back on the writing horse my plan has been to write lightly this weekend, which I’ve done, with the knowledge that starting tomorrow there is no looking back. I’ve two days left at work and then I am out until January 2nd. The plan is to write my fingers into bloody little stumps in that time. No goals about the number of pages, or chapters, just to write until I can’t write anymore. When I set goals that have to do with word counts/page numbers, or the like it’s too easy for me to feel derailed. As in, “Well, I’m never going to make 15 pages, so why bother at all?!” The other thing is I know that when I get back to work in January I’ll be busy for at least a month, and more like 6 weeks. I need to have enough done that getting busy at work won’t stop my progress.
There are no promises about what will happen in this space over the next few weeks. Sometimes when I write like this my posting actually increases, because I need an outlet. Other times I just need to walk away from all writing for a while.
Writing Updates …
Someday I will write about something other than writing, I promise. Unfortunately, I don’t anticipate that day happening with any regularity any time soon.
Recognizing my need for some help getting my butt in the seat and actually writing, I decided to build writing into my schedule. Not wanting to overwhelm myself, I started with just one week at a time, and I built into the schedule the writing I was already doing. Since I was already writing on the bus, and I knew there was no way I’d be getting up any earlier than 6:00am, the next time I could work writing into my schedule was at lunch. So, I started putting my lunch/writing on my schedule at work. Initially, I was going to work at the library, which would have the added benefit of getting me to walk across campus another couple of times during the day. The reality is that it’s getting to be winter, which around here means rainy and cold – walking across campus is not necessarily going to motivate me to get writing. Just outside of my office there are several cubicles used from math/science tutoring, so now I just check the tutoring schedule to see which one is open, and I take the little netbook in a cubicle and write for an hour. Surprisingly, I really love it. I don’t waste time getting anywhere, and it still feels like a ‘new’ space, and since it is a cubicle I can really focus.
At the start, I’d also put some evening writing time in the schedule, from 7pm – 9pm. Yeah, um, that didn’t work. My brain is pretty much drained by that time, and I want some time to spend with the DH. Sure, we might spend all that time sitting on the couch playing Scrabble on my phone, but it’s still together time. Ok, and sometimes, when the stars align, we have sex. The point is that no good writing happens, not even shitty first draft writing. Not keeping the appointment was diminishing the success I felt at writing everyday in other situations, so I took it off the schedule.
So, this is what my writing schedule looks like. Early morning bus time, an hour at lunch, and full mornings on the weekends. This might not help me meet the crazy goals I’ve set for myself, but, most importantly, I think it is a sustainable schedule. (I’m silly like this, so I made sure the appointments show up in my calendar as a color I like.) Time for my weekend writing to start.
On Writing
Writing the dissertation has been a project in trying to figure out what works best for me as a writer. It’s not like I didn’t already have a writing process, but that process was built around fulfilling a certain number of pages for an assignment.
The dissertaion is the first project I’ve attempted that didn’t come with an assignment. Well, I suppose “write a book about a scholarly topic” is a kind of assignment. The problem with this particular kind of assignment is that if I wanted to write a book it might not be fiction, but it might not be about a scholarly topic. Okay, enough about the dissertation as a project, this post isn’t supposed to be a diatribe about graduate education.
It’s about figuring out what I need as a writer, and really coming to own that title. I might not be a writer in the way Tana French or John Connoly are writers, but I am a writer nonetheless, and I am a writer in need of a method.
Consequently a good part of the dissertation process has been trying to find a writing method that works for me. This week I’m giving scheduling a try. Instead of just knowing when I need to write and telling myself to do it. I’ve actually put it in my calendar. To make myself feel like I’ve accomplished something I’ve made some times that I’m already writing into appointments on my calendar, and then added some new ones as well. It’s an ambitious calendar, and while I don’t want to give myself an out before I start, there are some appointments I anticipate dropping already.
In addition to the calendar, I’ve set up a spread sheet to keep track of my word counts. I think that if I stick with this long enough it will work for me. My problem with word counts, however, is that they don’t really do to well for revisions, and since that is where a lot of my work is currently, I suspect I’m going to get frustrated when my word counts aren’t that good because in addition to writing that day, I deleted a lot of crap.
In lieu of the dissertation
Busy times, busy times.
In a perfect world busy times might mean I have a lot to say, but I think we’ve already established this is not a perfect world. Around here, busy times just means other writing. The last couple of weeks, I’ve actually managed to work a little on my dissertation.
Last week, I think it was Tuesday, I turned in the first few pages of my Introduction to my committee chair. She sent me good feedback, and said she was pleased. Riding the high of getting the introduction in shape, I brazenly thought I could just dive into Chapter 1 a.k.a – THE THEORY. As much as I adore M. Levinas about two minutes of diving back into Totality and Infinity told me I wasn’t ready for that yet. This week I’ve been focused on Chapter 3, which is where everything gets fun. The most challenging part of Chapt. 3 is walking my walk.
Since I spend the whole dissertation talking about hospitality, I think it is only fair that I give the essay a hospitable reading, but ultimately the chapter says “Hey, you got it wrong.” The entire chapter is an attempt to respectfully disagree with what the article says.
Learning and not learning my lesson
Life is ridiculously stressful right now. Yes, that is a stupid statement, because really … When isn’t life stressful?
For a myriad of reasons I won’t list because it will just sound like whining, it seems like life has moved beyond the normal limit of stress, and into the patently ridiculous. Honestly, all I can do about it is shake my head and chuckle bitterly.
A few years ago, I learned my lesson about stress the hard way, so I know that I should be managing this all a little better, but to be honest I’m kind of at a loss. Too much is happening too fast, and finding a way to slow it down enough to even fit any sort of de-stressing activity into my day is impossible. What I do know is I need to figure this out because my stress level is manifesting in distraction. My attention span is pretty non-existent at this point, and at least twice today I’ve opened a program only to stare at the screen wondering what it was I meant to do.
The .25 seconds it takes me to log into an account shouldn’t be long enough to make me forget what I was doing. It’s definitely time to start ignoring myself, and really committing to some daily yoga practice. Laying off the caffeine might help too, but who really thinks that is going to happen any time soon.
D5 Creation