Day 17: Better than day 16...

Just finished one of the two papers! I expect to complete the other tomorrow and be off to Alberta for the holidays comps-free!

Today was better than yesterday. Yesterday I spent over 8 hours simply entering references into my reference management software. Every time I went to enter a reference into the paper, the program told me that the reference was not yet in the database and every time I responded, out loud, with "AW COME ON!! WHAT THE FUCK HAVE I BEEN DOING ALL WEEK???", followed by a frustrated 'roar'. Those who are aware of reference management programs know that there are two ways to enter references into it's database: 1) via direct export from a search engine (nice and convenient), or 2) manually. If I have a bunch of references that haven't been directly imported from the library database for whatever reason, I usually pop in an old fave movie or show, like Anne of Green Gables or Battlestar Galactica, and sit and mindlessly enter them in manually. In my head I had previously done this for hours for this paper's references. Apparently, in reality, I had not. So I spent the day manually entering probably over a 100 references and growing increasingly frustrated and angry, temperature rising, heat emanating from my chest outwards, so much so that I had to take off my snuggie.... a pleasant state to spend the day in, of course.

Ultimately, what was really going on was, not only Day 4 of my hangover recovery cycle, but also that, in my head, I was wanting to be somewhere else. There is no certainty as to where that someplace else is but I was not happy right where I was. Perhaps I'm excited to get home for xmas, perhaps I'm sick of writing, perhaps I'm disgusted with the clutter I've produced while working at home this week... I want I want I want. It is that rejection of the present, that it is not okay right where I am, that made my blood boil yesterday whilst sitting home alone entering references. White people problems... 

Day 15: the degradation of discipline

My immense discipline and focus has begun to degrade. It started late last week with a couple "social" interactions that included some wine and consequent sleep-ins. While awesome and healthy to see friends and family, and arguably more important than my academic goals in general, I have allowed it to distract me from the matter at hand. I'm on to  crazy cutting and editing this week and seemed to have resigned myself to the content that is on paper now, the content that I feel I honestly wrestled with the last couple weeks. But it's time to cut my losses and forget about the potential "nobel-prize-genius" I could include in the papers for this exam if I just worked a tiny bit harder. I am still further distracted as I get excited to wrap up the semester and head back to Alberta for the holidays this coming Friday.

I'm actually okay with this "resignation" because it is important not to be too hard on oneself when producing drafts. Typically in academia you would never just produce something on your own. There would always be checks and balances, supervisory committees, peer-reviewers, older and wiser collaborators to help add to a publication and make it 10 times better, etc. I have thought a lot about trusting in my abilities to produce something of quality by myself, trying to internalise first place ribbons for writing at county exhibitions when I was in elementary school, award winning poetry in high school, almost a decade of A+  university papers, and encouragement and praise for my writing products from various academics over the years. However, while the longitudinal evidence supports the trust I try to have in my capabilities, doubt rears its head time and time again....but alas I think this might be a product of the nature of academia.

Top of day 9: In other health news, scientist finds glee dance party breaks cure for detached-head syndrome...

I'm officially so cranially engaged I started losing moments of my day to a point where I apparently moved an object from the top shelf of the closet to my bed at some point during the day and have ABSOLUTELY no recollection of physically doing it. When I walked into my bedroom later in the afternoon yesterday and saw this item on the bed my first thought was  "oh my god was someone in here??!!" After my heartbeat slowed down following this incredibly creepy thought, I reasoned that "no, I've been here all day and heard nothing out of the ordinary so I must have taken it down from the shelf at some point earlier in the day".

To balance this detached-head syndrome, yesterday it dawned on me how important it is to, at some point during the day, preferably multiple times a day, just be in my body. I've devised a couple excellent tactics: the first is doing yoga, intense and fiery Ashtanga in the wee hours of the morning and calm, cooling yin prior to bedtime, breathing and just being mindful of the energy and feelings within the body. The second tactic is a day time one I've taken to, of taking a dance break (stolen from Tina Fey on 30 Rock) at which time I chose two of my favourite glee soundtrack songs and dance like an asshole. I'm hoping to do this more in the coming days to keep myself "here" as much as possible.

This Sunday I started working on paper #2 which is the theory/research methods paper. It is most certainly more challenging to make an entertaining read on these kinds of topics than on topics that include politically charged real-life examples of things. Also, it is most difficult to avoid writing something that regurgitates the theories of old from the writings of others (ie. to actually be creative and have an original thought). This week I have found that one must simply trust in the intellectual process. Reading and reading and getting "theoried out", as one friend describes it, will eventually lead to some creative and original conclusions but they cannot be forced. Realizing that this is how I've been approaching academic writing for the last few years but finally having articulated what my writing process is.The work of reading and writing things out in a manner that seems trite, unoriginal, and disconnected, accompanied by thoughtful and intentional reflection will tend to always result in something you can be proud of, that you have integrated ideas in way that no one else has before. Although they may be small insights, they add to the larger theory puzzle.

How cozy a day to be cooped up in my festive christmas-y apartment while the remnants of a tropical storm is lightly battering Vancouver today.

Day 5: this is awesome!!

Spirits and attitudes remain solidly high as I begin day 5. My only real crisis right now is how the hell I am going to cut 4000 words out of the first paper.Yes, being non-verbose has never been a shortcoming of mine. After vomiting over 15,000 words onto the page in the first two days I've managed to reel it in to about 12,000 so the trend appears to be in the right direction.

I had a meeting with my supervisor yesterday and we were discussing how the process of writing this exam has been for me so far this week and I told her that it's been interesting really thinking about the questions and trying to figure out what the committee actually means by them. She responded "I'm not sure any of us on the committee actually know what we mean either." Awesome right?? With the weight of providing specific responses to the questions lifted, today I feel ready to get CRAZY.

I've also been debating with myself whether I should leave in some of the "funny" and the unintentional colloquialisms that emerged during the first initial vomit on day 1 and day 2. I think that I'm an adequate enough academic writer that the "funny" can actually be pulled off because there is actual substance throughout. I feel relatively confident they won't fail me and kick me out of my PhD for using the phrase "but oh-so-tasty" when referring to the junk available for students to purchase in schools.

As far as I can tell thus far, being a bit hermit-y is kind of my jam when I'm being really productive. Probably if I were just watching netflix for 21 days straight by myself I might feel some craving to be around other humans...and I loves me some netflix.

Bonuses to writing comprehensive exams so far:

1) It's a solid excuse for staying at home and not being sociable which would otherwise appear as unhealthy

2) I have spent no money this week

3) I love reading and writing and learning

4) I've allowed' myself certain junky comfort foods that I otherwise try to avoid (Miss Vikis and skittles)


Challenges to writing comprehensive exams so far:

1) a little something I call "finger overexertion". The etiology of this short-term disorder is typing for more than six hours straight. The symptoms include clunky typing techniques where your fingers feel like they are tripping over keys, misspelling of the same word over and over again as you constantly miss one leter due to exhaustion.

2) "chair sores"

3) having really important library books checked out that keep getting recalled by the library because some ass-clown has requested them...I mean, why the heck do other people need books about mixed-methods research during the holiday, right??? I've decided to bite the bullet and not bring them back until I am done with them-- which brings me to my next challenge...

4) library fines


Writing tip #1:
To avoid lame-duck syndrome (occurs when you work from the top of a document to the bottom and by the time you get to those last couple paragraphs you are being redundant and unoriginal) I like to undertake the writing process in a table of three columns, one column contains the points you want to make, then the adjacent cell in the adjacent column is the full paragraph on that point you want to make, and the third adjacent cell in the column adjacent to that column is just for notes about what needs to be done on that paragraph. This allows me to jump from top to bottom working on just individual cells (which contain like one paragraph about one point) and then the unoriginality and redundancy, as well as the really good stuff, is dispersed throughout the entire document rather than just all the good stuff at the beginning.

Day 2 of Descent into Comprehensive Exam Insanity

DISCLAIMER: I know I posted in another earlier blog from a couple years ago but just a short preface to say that I acknowledge 1) how self-indulgent blogging is and 2) that all of my blogs are "white-people-problem" blogs and I am a privileged young woman who barely earned any of it.


DAY 2: As soon as I began the writing process on day one I immediately felt the onset of impostor syndrome, an extremely useful label for a non-DSM neuroses. Impostor syndrome has been defined by the experts on wikipedia as the inability to internalise successes, therefore always feeling as if you're faking it all and tricking a lot of smart people. It is especially common in female graduate students. I've often described it as feeling like I'm the wizard in the Wizard of Oz and one day someone is just going to pull the curtain back and just find me...little me with no original and creative ideas, regurgitating information, being pedantic. As I delved into day one, the doubts about my ability to produce two doctoral-level papers and whether or not I was actually be able to complete these two papers sufficiently in 21 days. So I turned on the obsessive maniac side of myself to push through the habit and desire I have practiced over the last few years of never working evenings... finding the will through obsession to push through an intense, non-stop 10 hours of writing. The obsession with what I"m working on and to have it finished in 21 days is so great that I've managed to ignore the fact that I have a bag of Miss Vikis salt and vinegar chips in my cupboard and I've only eaten half of it in two days. This is not small victory for those of you who know me and understand my shove-miss-vikis-in-my-mouth-until-my-tongue-bleeds addiction. This is good. After my masters degree I feared I'd never be able to harness the kind of focus I once had for writing lengthy 'things'. I guess I can! This is hopeful!

However, shortly into day one, by 3 pm, after only 7 hours of writing, I noticed the beginnings of the degradation of my ability to make a decision. My friend and I discussed this idea last weekend as we talked about an article that had made the rounds on facebook about why successful people wear the same thing everyday. The theory is that we only have so much decision making capacity in a given day and minimising petty decisions, like your attire, helps the decision-making process from degrading as fast throughout the day. Over the weekend I also spent the entirety of my Saturday cooking all of my meals for the next 21 days because I know myself well enough to know that as soon as I'm feeling presssure to finsish something I will not take the time to cook but rather justify ordering Papa Johns from across the street costing me precious dollars and life-years. As my friend and I discussed this I realised that the underlying reason of why I chose to prepare meals for the next month in the first place was precisely so I didn't have to add deciding what to cook for dinner to my daily decision making. Anyway, I noticed the degradation of my decision-making when, after going for a quick brisk walk at 3 pm, I entered into my apartment and took my boots off. I picked them up to throw them in the closet and noticed I had dragged in some slush on the bottom of my boots. Now, I have this beautiful vintage hardwood floor to which I have already caused some extensive (and expensive) water damage in the past year. I have no door mats around the front door nor in the closet to absorb the slush from the boots. I held the boots in my hand and stared at the bottoms of them for at least 60 seconds as I was unable to decide what to do with them while they dried. I finally figured out a solution but had lost precious moments staring at my boots in my hand.

Lastly, I've already resorted to methods other than "Easy Now" sleepy time tea and yin yoga before bed to ensure I get a full sleep. As the excitement of writing my comprehensive exams have built up over the last few weeks I have been having some restless nights, falling asleep by 8:30 pm and waking up at 1:30 unable to return to sleep as sub-conscious stress simmered on the edge of my dreams. The night before Day 1 I did everything I could to ensure a naturally good night sleep but to no avail. I woke up at 1:30 am and finished reading Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World".  Last night, however, I will simply say that I found my "soma" (reference to the 'anti-anxiety' susbtance used in "Brave New World") in my freezer, leftover from this past summer and had an AMAZING sleep. We'll leave it at that because there might be a chance, albeit slim, that I'll have a disgusting desire to go into politics one day.

MY FAVOURITE THING I WROTE TODAY (which may or may not make final cuts):

"Where they [the American National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and the British Colombian school meal program for socioeconomically vulnerable children] differ substantially, however, is when it comes to the nationalistic underpinnings of the NSLP, both in terms of promoting domestic food commodity consumption and in terms of making sure children are healthy enough to potentially be drafted for military service. This was a key reason for the original enactment of the federal NSLP in 1946 and continues to be so today (cite too fat to fight) with politicians in recent years referring to the obesity epidemic as a “matter of national security” (Fed-up documentary). The US is often criticized for  exploiting impoverished demographics by disproportionately recruiting soldiers from some of the poorest areas of the US. It's fitting, then, if these soon-to-be recruits are being fed their school lunches by the state during their formative years so they will at least pass the physical once duty calls."