Rescheduled and Postponed
Got a call yesterday asking me to reschedule my ultrasound, since their equipment is down for the count. So, I’m going in on Monday instead. Three more days to fret about what they might find.
And work on my dissertation has been indefinitely postponed. I couldn’t even tell you why; I guess it all comes down to a bad case of the spirit being willing, but the flesh being weak. I wake up every morning with good intentions, and I even know what it is I want to be doing with it. I’ve decided - at least provisionally - that even if I never get a teaching job again, it’s still worth my while to finish the PhD, so it’s not so much vacillation on that point.
(!!Sesame Street is doing a Law and Order parody with a muppet that’s actually a dead ringer for Richard Belzer!!!)
I think a lot of it - well, there are two things. One is that I’m just dog-tired - not just from the pregnancy, although that’s a big source, but from the last 2+ years. We can’t afford daycare of any kind, and this home-all-the-time business is so much more exhausting than I ever thought it would be. I can theoretically work at my parents’ house, but it’s not entirely conducive to working. I feel more like a mom/daughter there than a serious student. A bourgeois concern, to be sure, and something I should probably just get over, but there it is.
The other thing is that I’m just so freaking isolated from any kind of academic community. People warn you not to leave the fold before you’re done, and it’s good advice; we just couldn’t make it on what we were making there AND afford any kind of good childcare. And since we did leave, I’m really floundering around out here on my own. It makes me feel all the more divorced from what people are working on out there, and it makes me feel the better part of academically worthless to boot. What could I possibly have to say that anyone might ever be interested in reading? What must my advisor and committee think of me (that one bugs me more than I like to admit)? I don’t even think about other profs in the department; the ones who knew me back when have written me off, I’m sure.
Bleah.
For the record, since this seems to get lost when I whine like this, I’m not talking about being worthless in a general sense - particularly not in terms of being a parent. I know that parenting is entirely valuable work, and for the most part I think I do okay. MM’s healthy, very happy, bright, and really, really funny (right now she’s enacting some conversation between her “Daddy” dinosaur and her “baby” dinosaur - she’s using it to figure out what happens to Daddy every morning; where he goes, what he does, etc.). I’m just saying “worthless” in the academic/intellectual sense, since it is still a part of me, at least nominally. I hate having this unfinished business…but I’m obviously not making big moves to get it over with, and that’s driving me nuts.
/whiny rant
