Because it reduces me to this behavior, this thinking (this whining)...
Everyday, the first thing I do (after coffee, after eating bread or rice and eggs or oatmeal, after washing my face, after shooing everybody out of the house so we can all go about the business of the day) is turn my computer on and open up my dissertation files.Ah hell.
A note I wrote to myself in green text stands out from the white Microsoft Word document that is peppered with black letters. The note says, START HERE DARLING.
I stare at the note for five minutes and try to make sense of the text that comes before it, and after it. I absently scroll up and down, up and down, stopping at random to read sentences that don’t make sense to me.
After this ritual, I check my mail, I write emails, I check multiply, I post stuff, I check flickr, I post photos, I read blogs, I post entries, I go to three quarks daily, and I proceed to find all kinds of things to read that are infinitely more interesting and far less intimidating than my bloody dissertation.
And then I go back to my dissertation files. I don’t want to, but I have to. Why? Because I’ve already put five years of my life into this. It would be a total waste of five years not to see this through to the end. Because I’ve dragged my family into the mire of this dissertation and forced them to live with it so by now I owe it to them to finish. Because if I don’t, I won’t be able to face all those people who contributed to the research and who tolerated my endless silly questioning.
Oh ya, because I’ll get two extra initials before my name, and three extra initials after it. I’d like five extra zeroes at the end of my future income, too but who knows whether those initials will help me rake them in. At the beginning, that’s the magic I believed extra initials would do for me. I have shed all such delusions (but I'm still hoping).
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