1. I hate this semester. Officially. I was hoping every week wasn't going to be like this -- but no, it is. TAing is the culprit. I fantasized that it would in fact be less work than taking a course. Ha. I refer you to my schedule -- which may not look so compressed at first glance, but consider that until monday afternoon I'm frantically reading for that seminar and until tuesday afternoon I'm frantically reading for that seminar and after that I take a quick breather to watch SVU and answer emails and then wednesday I'm frantically reading and preparing for my sections. I've gotten two hours of sleep the past two wednesday nights, which is really not an effective game plan, I realize. But there's nowhere to snitch the extra time from, so it becomes a matter of striking a balance between the inverse proportionality of prepared and awake (to paraphrase Michael's advice). I appreciate that awake is important, but I also don't feel it's a wise idea to show up to teach having done any less of the assigned reading than I'm already pulling off. So, a conundrum. The sections themselves are fine, and I'm reasonably good at teaching and not at all nervous or confused in the end, and my students are great, and one of these weeks I'd like to talk to them when I'm actually fully functional.

The ostensible advantage of this schedule, as you see, is that my week is completely over thursday at 12:30pm (except for an orchestra rehearsal). Let us now turn to fig. B: how I will be spending my leisurely three-day weekends for the rest of the semester (dates are the fridays)

We had our first TA meeting. My two favorite professors and two of my favorite friends. It's going to be glorious. Then L and W invited themselves to dinner with us -- and treated us. We're going to have our second TA meeting in L's swimming pool on Wednesday. Happiness.

Talking to professors socially, still, is like getting drunk or winning something or meeting a new crush -- euphoric, giddy. Also, it's like public speaking or the first day of camp or middle school -- nerve-wracking, unworthiness-inducing. I assume I'll eventually adjust.

L didn't like my paper as much as I'd hoped. I agree with her criticisms. Nevertheless, I'm going to be carrying that weight around in my stomach for a little while.

All my grades from last year are in. All A's! But on term papers I got more A-'s. Sigh. It's hard for me, sometimes, to be told I still have things to learn.

The first thing I'd forgotten about school over the summer is the emotional roller coaster. It's the vertiginous sensation of growing up.

I turned it in!!! It is strangely anticlimactic, but I imagine I will gradually adjust to the bliss that is summer vacation. More soon...

Ha. I guess I'm not actually blogging every day, eh? In direct contradiction to my self-proposed philosophy of writerblogification, I've been projecting my paperish guilt onto you, my virtually nonexistent readership, and deferring my report until I felt I had accomplished something substantial. Well, I do and I did. That is, I've knocked out 11 pages of not-too-rough draft (and this bit of fluff may fall well short of 20, so really the better part of it is done), albeit with only minimal diligence. Somehow, instead of the horrific paroxysms of procrastination that have characterized much of my recent writing process, the hours I spend daily in the little online universe I've adopted (in lieu of enjoying the gloriously real universe of a city around me, apparently -- but such are the rhythms that have established themselves) seem like voluntary and deliberate pleasures, the hours I spend writing (often, fewer) like a balanced (if not exactly enjoyable) element in a routine. It's July, and I can't bring myself to be bothered by my unnecessarily slow pace (not more than 3 pages per day) if that's the price of some modicum of quotidian contentment. Lately, I don't need to go to the coffeeshop to make myself focus (or perhaps that trick just stopped working, and I do no worse at home). In any case, I provisionally predict that I'm on track to finish the draft by Saturday, then put a couple of days of none-too-inspired effort into revising it before I turn it in. Just in time to, well, leave.

The paper is mildly entertaining but fairly lame and simplistic, the sort of thing a typical grad student might write if they were going to actually force themselves to turn it in on time. Not at all the sort of masterpiece that warrants a 7-month extension. But given my history, succeeding in writing a mediocre paper fairly quickly with only minor tortures is perhaps an even greater accomplishment. I am managing to be reasonably confident that the prof won't now eternally hate me.

I remember quite clearly the first "real" paper I wrote, a watershed, an early hinge in my life between the primordial nebula of childhood and the coalescing commitments of adulthood. 11th grade, on Lady Macbeth, for a teacher I was painfully crushed out on, a crisis, an extension, a masterpiece. While writing that paper, and every paper since, I reached a most terrifying and unpleasant point where research was done, ideas were floating around, but I just didn't know yet what the paper was *about*. The problem of coming up with a thesis statement, was what we used to call it in college. Every single time I have managed to get past this impasse, to come to an understanding of what I want to say, and to write the paper. Yet to this day, I have no idea *how* I do this, what procedures will facilitate it. It is an alchemy that I seems to churn somewhere outside my control. I am at that point with this paper now (and really since December). I've read over my notes, and the course has come back to me. I remember the readings, because I was paying particular attention -- perhaps not with the immediacy of last fall, but I still think that will actually facilitate my writing process by helping me streamline my usually excessive citation. I am thinking of using the Jack Ryan scandal as my framing example, which is in my head because T was writing a column about it and our discussion piqued my interest. Trying to decide whether adding an outside topic like this will make it longer or more difficult or shorter and more easily focused. I desperately need to just start writing, because until I do that I'm not moving toward being finished writing. But I can't (and I do mean can't) start writing until I know what I'm going to say -- not all of it, but that sweet spot of enough that I can work the rest out as I go along. Other than reading my notes, reading them again, thinking, I have no method for pushing myself to that place. I do know, though, that the amount of time I am still spending on other things, most notably several extremely stimulating conversations about the Olivia paper, are not helping. But for the life of me I can't convince myself that these activities are less important than this rather uninspired term paper. Which I'd really like to figure out and start writing tomorrow. But I say that every day.

The internet is eating me alive. I still haven't gotten started on the next paper, because I'm dealing with post-Olivia paper fallout of the nicest kind. Having really great conversations with a couple people. And just obsessing over the richness of livejournal fandom. I don't know how I am possibly going to be able to focus and put this puppy to bed, but I suppose I have to find a way.

Am considering posting daily while I write this paper. Not that anybody cares. But I am curious to create a record of my process. And I'm getting all interested in blogging, for real (frighteningly). There was a very good reason I didn't start in on all this sooner, I realize. It is very time-consuming. Arm hurting from typing so much today.

Would like to get around to seeing real people again someday soon too, though.

I finished the Olivia paper, at last.

I am happy of course. But my happiness is tempered by the sheer punishing duration of it all. It got to the point where I just had to think of it as a part of my extracurricular activities in fandom, which it was. Because otherwise the thought of how little time I will actually have to play in said fandom after I finish the seemingly interminable homework is too bitter. I feel tired. And dreading this last paper, dreading since December, paradoxically and probably also because it is for my very favorite class/professor so far. Hard to feel a sense of accomplishment when the pressure is unabated.

After all the work I put into the Olivia paper (more than a month's worth), it seems strangely empty, now. I think it is interesting, in TV studies' terms, but no radical disciplinary intervention. Both too specific and too self-indulgently abstract for that. One thing I've learned about TV studies this semester though is that most of what people publish is crap -- so maybe it's worth putting out there. What would make it meaningful, to me, is if it finds a prominent place within Olivia fandom. But it suspect it may not be very accessible -- not my strong suit. The few people I have met online while writing it who like it though, that is rewarding. Possibly I will cycle back toward loving it again -- especially if Lynne thinks it's good. Really her opinion matters the most to me.

I'm taking the day mostly off today to regroup, catch up on a few things, sleep in. Go to the gym, which resolution has been woefully neglected over the past weeks of Olivia-francticness. Think I'm taking the 4th off too to spend with some friends, since I've had barely any human contact this month (outside of my beloved Clyde), and that makes me feel strange in a way that does not help my productiveness. So that leaves tomorrow to go over my copious notes and sort out this paper, so I can start writing on Monday.

It is agreed that I should find a therapist in the fall who can help me start working out some of these difficulties. Part of it is just that to write six papers (five, since I combined the two about globalization) in only a few months is just gruelling, when they are all polished, serious papers (not that I wouldn't have loved to have turned in worse papers faster, but I just couldn't). But also, I have to find a better way to write, inside myself.

http://www.thisinternetsite.com/tmo%20index.html

And by the way, I finally finished my torturous globalization paper. Before the end of finals period, which I thought was in time not to get incompletes. But apparently not. Sigh. Anyway, I still have two more papers to write, which I'm hoping to finish before the end of June. But after I'm a free girl I'm going to try to update this site more frequently...

Of course, I got over my cold (though I'm still coughing). But losing nearly a week of functional life did disrupt the auspicious under-control beginning of my semester. Suddenly, I was struggling to catch up. It took me a while to get back on my feet, and meanwhile I've abandoned most projects except assigned reading (this seems to be typical). At this point, I'm effectively only still behind in one class, and that only partially excused by the illness. Planning to sort that out over spring break, when I'm supposed to write a paper for it. What has fallen by the wayside, of course, is last semester's remaining paper, which (you will recall) I was supposed to make some headway on the weekend I got sick. I don't have high hopes of getting to it before summer break.

In spite of all this rather bleak discipline, I can't bring myself to be unhappy. Actually, I was veering dangerously close to depression last week, but then me and my cohorts serendipitously ran into my professors Phil and Wendy at a restaurant, and had a long and friendly chat with them. Phil is like my academic Daddy. And I want to be Wendy when I grow up, so naturally my relationship with her thus far has been fraught. But, totally out of the blue, she said such validating things to me, and we had a really lovely conversation. And she snitched some of my french fries. It changed my whole outlook on the universe (seriously).

Also, in spite of the sometimes difficult elements of the friend crush model, I really do love my friends. I didn't expect grad school to be like college or camp, where you bond with people through an institutional context that produces a notably domestic intimacy. But it is. There are some people I don't manage to hang out with as much as I'd like, but many who have managed to work their way into my schedule (now that the term is well underway). Some I see weekly in class, Jonna (of SVU fame) gets a slice of Wednesday night (when I don't have screenings, this semester), Erin+Ra are my party dykes on weekends, and some of the MCM kids hit the Grad Center Bar (yes, there is a bar on campus) on Fridays. The sense of community compensates, in part, for deeper mourning for the time in NYC and even Boston that I've had to give up.

I have a cold again, two weeks after getting over my interminable January illness. Just great. I actually had to schlep to the health center today because my doctor parents were worried that I have pneumonia or something since my sypmtoms came back so fast. But no, it's just a nasty cold, probably unrelated, so it looks like I'll live. Meanwhile, I'm way behind on reading now because I've felt two crappy to concentrate on it the past few days. So my big plan to get a lot of work done on last semester's paper this weekend is about to get foiled again. Sigh.

I got invited to play in a viola sextext -- that's six violas! I am so excited because chamber music is my favorite, and I haven't gotten to play in an ensemble in years. I have thought about organizing a quartet at Brown, but don't have the time and energy this year, so I've just been playing in the orchestra (which is already organized -- I just have to show up). But then this dropped in my lap (apparently the word is that I play well, though in my opinion I am extremely rusty). We get to play the (needless to say) modern piece the teacher selected in a master class with Kim Kashkashian. She is the best living violist, and I worship her. Yay!

I ran into my professor the other day during the Wendy Brown festivities, the one I still owe a paper to from last semester, and she said "Are you sure you don't want to just write it over the summer?" Which is nice because now I feel like I don't have to be too stressed/guilty about it. But not helpful in terms of motivating me to work on it, which is what I am trying to do (at least for this weekend and next weekend). I'd like to write at least the part that's closely tied to the course readings while they're fresh in my mind. I can't say I've gotten a whole heck of a lot done in the past two days, though. See above.