Now/here no/where woman

At a Women's Month celebration the other day, I was seated with the Little Boss on my lap and her Papa, my Outrigger, stood behind us, ready to take her if needed. A woman I hold much respect for, a senior in academic circles, came up to me and commented on how the Little Boss has grown and I introduced her to the Outrigger. She smiled at him and said in a tone that I heard to be partly scolding, partly teasing,  "You're the one who's keeping her from being an anthropologist!" He and I responded in unison, "Noooo." But she had turned and walked away. I suppose she had said what she wanted to say and didn't need or want to hear an answer. The Outrigger shrugged and said, "Some people just feel they have to say something." And with that shrug, I knew that the Outrigger had already brushed aside that brief encounter and was just minutes away from forgetting the whole incident -- a gift I wish I had too. But I was bothered, and he...

Image credit:  http://journalism.missouri.edu/alumni/larre-johnson-71.html Yes, I have a question. Could I have some bacon with that please?

I am temporarily in deep dissertation space. Blogging will resume when I discover a way out the blackhole through sheer mind-power. SHHHHHHH!

Here. Read all about annoying clichés in the natural sciences. In my dissertation I am guilty of "shedding light" on the messy complexities that get tangled up in each other when nature conservation and indigenous peoples' rights meet. I am pleased to note that I didn't call for any "paradigm shifts" but I probably said as much, given that there are countless "missing links" in the interactions between agents of conservation and indigenous communities . The former are searching for the "holy grail" of indigenous peoples living in harmony with nature and the latter just want a "silver bullet" with which to shoot the conservationists and other bossy werewolves in the head.

... is my Mac and I am so relieved that we are on speaking terms again. It's been a long time since I've spoken with The Mac or my books. I used to do it all the time, especially when I had eureka moments, then I would exchange a few happy phrases and whoops of delight with the tools of my trade. People around me find it disturbing when I do this because they think I'm speaking to them but I'm barely even aware they're there. So this is a good sign for the coming writing days, that I have resumed the conviviality of the long hours The Mac and I spend together. Me, typing on The Mac: Logging canals are private property of the persons who invested in having them built. The trees that the canals lead to also become the property of the investor. However, once the trees have been cleared, the land around the canal reverts to tanah kosong , land that belongs to no one or, literally, zero land... The Mac makes clicking, typing sounds, and whirrs every so softly, almost lik...

I'm having to go back to my interview transcripts -- in Bahasa Indonesia. Pak J: Ya, dan sebenarnya disini kebanyakan masyarakat khawatir kalau-kalau hutan. ada disekitar sini di daerah wilayah kecamatan Tasik Payauan (TP) karena pada umumnya pada saat ini kemungkinan masyarakat di daerah kecamatan TP ini, termasuk mungkin dianggap 20% pekerja kayu, nah siapa tau nanti Taman Alam (TA) bisa ada sehingga terhambat kelancaran usaha masyarakat tentang kegiatan penebangan kayu, dan seandainya nanti bagi pemerintah atau bagi penyalur TA ini apakah nanti misalnya mereka menutup usaha masyarakat tentang penebangan kayu apakah nanti ada peluang bagi masyarakat untuk membuka jalan usaha lain lagi. God help me.

From Wondermark: Illustrated Jocularity by David Malki. Tip: Click on image for better viewing. When perusing strips on the Wondermark site, hover your mouse over the strip to get further insight into the comic.

What I am about to say will probably look like excuse for procrastination #247, but it's not. I have decided that since writing is my first love, my vocation, my calling, my pain, my joy, my craft, and my work, I shall no longer mentally beat myself over the head or kneel on a pile of mongo beans and punish myself when I am writing other things besides the diss. So there. I write, therefore I survive this mad world.

A whole new way of looking at my theoretical chapter . If only putting it all together could be this much fun! I'm considering sending my "revised" chapters to my supervisors in this format heeheehee! Credit where credit is due: A whole new way of procrastinating http://wordle.net/

Sometimes I feel like theory just buries lived experience under incomprehensible abstract bits. Why (cuss word) bother?

In my head, that is... It's time to get down to the nitty-gritty of my last chapter on Indonesia. I've been putting it off because, well, I don't know exactly. I get this feeling of dread every time I start. Found this in my fieldnotes. Could be the reason why. This is almost full disclosure here folks, the unedited whines of a woman anthropologist in the field. This will never make it into my dissertation, that's for sure. And I hope it doesn't come back to haunt me but hey, I have a question: Why do anthropologists who claim to write reflexive anthropology never reveal the ugliest parts of their fieldnotes? Maybe I'll find out after sending this out into the world. This was written on one of the worst nights of my fieldwork. That's right, ONE of... This is one of those nights when I barely have anything good to say, and so I have a lot to say. I can’t seem to live by the platitude, If you can’t say anything nice, then don’t say anything at all. I try thoug...

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. 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 ...

It feels like this. This is Kiwi Camus, except better because there's an end to the suffering. Video credit: Dony Permedi, master's thesis in animation!

When I started working on my bloody dissertation, DearD warned me that I would be asked a thousand times: "So what are you working on? What are you writing about?" Her sage advice was to think up three simple sentences that would sum it up nicely. For the first time in the past six years (SIX? WTF?!), three sentences came out of me effortlessly when the dreaded questions were addressed to me by a friend I hadn't seen in years, who, he updated me, now grows chemical-free, non-gmo, traditional rice varieties in Tabuk. Ashamed somewhat of the seeming uselessness and pretensiousness of what I do by comparison, I said, while squirming: "I've been looking at what happens when indigenous peoples' rights are combined with environmental issues in protected areas. My basic questions are, what happens to indigenous peoples' daily lives, and what happens to environmental problems when you put the two together? That's it." Actually that's just two whole...

This came in the mail today. I'm guilty of the ones in red. Come to think of it though, post-grad or not, this list suits a lot of my 'geeky' friends who are busily pursuing an obsession too. Ummm, I meant that as a statement of solidarity -- no insult intended! YOU MIGHT BE A GRADUATE STUDENT WHEN... you can analyze the significance of appliances you cannot operate; you have ever, as a folklore project, attempted to track the progress of your own joke across the Internet; y ou are startled to meet people who neither need nor want to read; you have ever brought a scholarly article to a bar; you rate coffee shops (or bars) by the availability of wifi and outlets for your laptop; everything reminds you of something in your discipline; you have ever discussed academic matters at a sporting event; you have ever spent more than $50 on photocopying while researching a single paper; there is a microfilm reader in the library that you consider "yours" (teka, uso pa ba ito...

Wagwag or not, Baguio pedestrians wear the best t-shirts ever.

Because writing the dissertation is turning me into more and more of a stranger withdrawn from many things. It was far better when I was doing fieldwork. At least then I was a stranger among people and things, everyday I learned something new, and by the end of it I was less of a stranger. Now I am a stranger again, and it worsens everyday. Because it makes me feel like my world has shrunken to a pressure chamber the space of a desk, filled with thousands of pages of pulp piled up on top of each other. Because it causes me so much anxiety that anything else is better, even babysitting my daughter's tamagochi. Because it doesn't feel real anymore. Because it's worst than the Roman Catholic Church. I can't go anywhere or do anything without having guilty thoughts about it. Because when people ask me about it I make involuntary, incoherent noises, and I don't mean that as a metaphor for academic jargon.

I've been living with my dissertation looming large over me and every one in my vicinity (sorry, people) for four years and five months now. Me: Yipppeeee! I'm nearly done with another paper! Artist-in-residence: Great. What about your phd? No. 1 biker boy: Bwahahahahaaaa! Me: Don't you get it?!? Every time I finish a paper I'm closer to getting the damn phd!!! Silent mirth on every one's faces. Me: GRRRRR!!! After this just three more papers to go! Artist-in-residence: Heeheehee! Gasp! Ok. That's good! No. 1 biker boy: Very good. We're sooo proud of you. Heeheehee. Me: Sit a little closer please, so I can smash your heads together.