Welp, I squandered another perfectly good day I had set aside to work on revisions. After lots of pacing, working on other projects, obsessively checking blogs, and a mid-afternoon sojourn to El Sol y La Luna for a dissatisfying huevos rancheros and funny-tasting tortilla chips, I currently have a headache, am hot, stiff, and due at Lovejoy's in an hour to listen to loud music.
In the crossing-things-off-lists department, I finished up my scope of work on a consulting contract I had, and let them know I wouldn't be available for further work. Yayhoo! But, wouldn't you know it, about three weeks ago another consulting opportunity came my way that I couldn't pass up, so I now have two other jobs besides finishing my dissertation. This new job has me working for the firm I worked for in Seattle. They are consultants on a project here in Austin, and brought me in as an independent to help out. It's a really interesting project, funded by the Gates Foundation, to engage the community in high school redesign efforts.
To add to the many self-inflicted barriers to finishing, I leave next week on a 16-day trip. Aagh! Maybe I need a new kitten.
Thursday
May 24, 2007
I have had this complete and total aversion to writing lately, as illustrated by my heavy use of photos and images in my blog entries. And lengthy quotations from Supreme Court justices. This probably has something to do with the fact that I am deep into the writing phase on my dissertation. After months of labored statistical analysis, or as we like to say, "running models," I finally have to face my 13 tables of regression coefficients and describe what it all means in English.
I finished a first draft of this results chapter, and it was painful technical writing. I felt like something really heavy was sitting on me. Today I met with my adviser to get some help in figuring out where to go from here, and I am feeling a little overwhelmed. I kind of know what I need to do to get it to where I want it, but I always have that niggling fear and self-doubt that I won't be able to do it. Like this time, I have just reached my limit and it's not going to happen. How did I become so fearful and lazy? That is a bad combination - the fear and the lazy. My adviser occasionally asks me, "what else have you been doing, besides this?" That question lays bare the hard reality that I have become a very poor manager of time.
I finished a first draft of this results chapter, and it was painful technical writing. I felt like something really heavy was sitting on me. Today I met with my adviser to get some help in figuring out where to go from here, and I am feeling a little overwhelmed. I kind of know what I need to do to get it to where I want it, but I always have that niggling fear and self-doubt that I won't be able to do it. Like this time, I have just reached my limit and it's not going to happen. How did I become so fearful and lazy? That is a bad combination - the fear and the lazy. My adviser occasionally asks me, "what else have you been doing, besides this?" That question lays bare the hard reality that I have become a very poor manager of time.
Wednesday
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