lines ever more unclear

I had a great weekend away. It wasn’t quite as restful as I had hoped but it was relaxing in a different way and I’ve fallen in love with a different part of the country.

Last week I met up with some colleagues of mine and we all discussed the whole research process. We’re all at different points in the process: I’m at the beginning, one person was in the middle, and the other was basically at the end. Talking to them made me feel better, although I’m still generally worried. But one of them suggested that I just read for a while and take short handwritten notes of the main points or things that grab my attention. Then, only after I know what’s going on in the document, I can worry about how I’m reproducing the document for my notes (camera, transcription, or photocopy). I tried this yesterday and it seemed to work well enough.

I made it to the archives yesterday; didn’t today. The rest of the week is shot since a friend and I are going on a mini-vacation Thursday. My hope is that I’ll get a ton of rest during our trip. Some of you have pointed to my sleep/morning routine as a possible problem and I think that’s quite right, or at least it was this morning.

As for leaving London, I’ve backed down a bit. Friday night I discussed the situation with a friend over dinner. He said, and I agree, that nothing’s really going to be solved by my leaving. So I’ll stick it out until late August, at which point I’ll reevaluate. If I’ve still gotten nothing done by that point, I’ll have to revisit this issue. Also, it’s probably time to email the advisor and set up a meeting.

I’m also planning to go to a different archive next week, just to switch things up a bit. I still haven’t figured out exactly how I’m going to move quickly through these sources; I’m still working with the volume I started working with in late May. No wonder there’s no motivation; I know I won’t finish the volume if I go today. I know I won’t finish it in a week. In fact, I flipped through the remainder of the volume yesterday; I was in the early 300s (although not really since I have to go back through the pages of handwriting that I thought I was going to take photos of) and this volume goes well into the 500s. It really was disheartening, especially since I do need virtually every scrap of information in this volume. This won’t be the case for every source I consult.  I need to have another think about the digital camera because I don’t have weeks/months to get through the occasional volumes that require such painstaking work. This volume is six weeks’ worth of government correspondence; there are probably another five or six of them that I’ll need to consult for this one chapter alone. At this pace, I could spend the remaining time just going through this one series of files for this fairly short period. That’s not going to work quite frankly.

Speaking of frankness, servetus suggested that my project may be too big. I agree. I had specific reasons for picking such a broad timespan but that may be a project for “the book”, if I ever make it there. It’s something I need to think seriously about and inevitably I’ll need to have a conversation with the advisor.

So last night I had a terrifying thought. What if I just leave London?

I’m to the point now where I’m concerned about my ability to salvage this trip. It’s become all too easy for me to not go to the archives; it doesn’t help that decision-making is made in the first few minutes after I wake up, where inevitably I feel like I’ve been hit by a tractor trailor. I’m not yet convinced it’s because I’m not meant to do history. After all, up until mid-May, I was working away diligently without any of this angst. All of this trouble was lurking but I was able to ignore it. My research trip to Global South Country was extremely productive. But once I got back, things began to fall apart. First, the turnaround time between GSC and London was probably too short but that wasn’t my choice. I had an unpleasant meeting with my adviser that made it impossible for me to ignore any longer just how bad our working relationship is. I was unable to take care of some important health issues because certain appointments couldn’t be scheduled. I trusted a guy who had already proven himself to be unreliable and, when he stood me up the Saturday before I left, screened my call that Sunday, and then acted like I wasn’t walking right past him on Monday, I fell apart, even though I had anticipated this event.

All that in the space of ten days.

I need to regroup and I don’t think that can happen over a weekend or even over a week or two. I’ve been in school since I was 4. I need significant time off. Leaving London might be the only way to do that. At any rate, the research schedule that I had planned doesn’t seem workable at the moment: returning to GSC in January for two months, then back here in March or April for four-plus months.

But of course ending this research trip early and taking time off isn’t really feasible. Where would I go? I have no housing at the university. Home is not an option for any lengthy stays. I have no furniture of my own so I can’t move into an apartment. If I take months off but still remain enrolled, that’s months of funding wasted and I’m quickly running out of funded time. Not to mention, that would wreck the adviser relationship that is already a disaster. If I take a leave of absence, I lose my paycheck and my current finances are not good enough to get me set up anywhere to find a job; and isn’t taking time off to regroup about not working myself into the ground?

I can’t seem to find any solutions here but I feel I’m at a crisis point.

The fact that I find it so easy not to go to the archives must mean that I shouldn’t be a historian, right? Or does it just mean that I’m horribly exhausted and desperately need a vacation that’s not coming since I’m on a six-month research trip?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how exactly I got to this point in my life where I have no motivation to do what I thought I wanted to do. At some point, I went wrong somewhere, right?

I’ve mentioned before that I feel like I chose the wrong graduate program. This is still true, I think, but I had no way of knowing how disastrous things would turn out in my current program and I had legitimate reasons, both personal and professional, for not choosing the other option. So even though I feel now like the other school would have been the best place, I believe I made the best decision at the time.

So I think the problem goes a bit further back. The problem may be the decision to go to graduate school at all.

Like many college freshmen, I wanted to be a doctor and I rushed into intro calculus and intermediate chemistry. Freshman year is difficult for everyone and combining freshman year with pre-med courses is brutal. However, I was dealing with more than just freshman year uncertainties. I went to college fleeing an unpleasant and restrictive childhood that ended with my mother’s death two months before high school graduation. For many reasons that I won’t list here, the emotional fallout was beyond crippling. Postponing college was not an option nor was mourning properly. It all exploded freshman year when I did horribly in subjects I had loved in college. I tried to pick myself up second semester but I collapsed again after a horrible dorm incident involving my closest “friend” at the time. By February of my freshman year, I had few friends, none particularly close; little family support. I slept all day and all night. I did no work. I skipped quizzes and assignments. Pre-med just wasn’t happening. Somehow by the end of the semester, I pulled myself together enough to show up for exams and avoid failing courses but the damage had been done. Complicating all of my plans was the fact that I was on academic scholarship and I was expected to maintain a certain GPA, which I hadn’t done. I was put on probation meaning that I needed to maintain a higher GPA each semester if I wanted to keep the scholarship. As much as I hadn’t wanted to, I had to drop pre-med.

I really didn’t know what I was going to study; I’d done extremely well in high school but my strength was science, particularly chemistry. Nothing else had really struck my fancy but chemistry was no longer an option. I’d taken a high school AP class in European history with an amazing teacher. I’d done well, I’d enjoyed the material, so history it was.

My sophomore year I took several history courses. I loved the flexibility of the major; I could take whatever I wanted, which I did. The randomness of my course selection explains many of the gaps in my professional background but I didn’t go into history to be a professional historian. I just needed a major and I didn’t have a lot of time to explore other disciplines. I also had so much more success in the humanities than the sciences, or so it seemed. I got B+s with ease and A-s with a decent amount of effort. I enjoyed history, or maybe I enjoyed having better grades. But somehow by the beginning of junior year, I had convinced myself that I was actually good at history and that I should potentially get a PhD in the subject. I say “convinced myself” because B+s and A-s symbolized success to me when they should have suggested that I was competent but not great and probably not the best candidate to be a professional historian.

But how could I have known? History is one of the few disciplines where undergraduate work can bear little resemblance to professional applications. History professors often focus more extensively on historical fact and narrative, particularly in lecture courses, than they do on the interpretations and arguments that define professional history. Despite writing a senior thesis, I didn’t fully understand what professional historians really did (once they returned from the archives) until well into graduate school.

Whether I was adequately prepared for graduate work is a matter for another post. What’s key to me is the meandering road I took to graduate school; I basically stumbled into it. Usually when I think about my path, I chalk it up to luck or “that’s the way life works sometimes.” But maybe the fact that I fell into history means that I should never have fallen at all. I’m not here because I was too spontaneous; if anything, I could do with some spontaneity in my life. But somehow I took an upswing in my academic performance to be a career sign.

enough said!

Yesterday was less successful. I went to the archives, so I’ve not fallen off the wagon already. As boring as this sounds, I’ve been testing out different tables at the archives as I figure out how I’ll handle the notetaking: will I rely primarily on my laptop or my digital camera? Yesterday I worked at one of the table with camera stands, hoping that I’d be able to move seamlessly between typing and taking pictures. It didn’t work. While the people next to me were clicking away with their professional cameras, my tiny digital camera doesn’t focus quickly; taking pictures quickly is impossible. Instead of staying seated and reaching up to push the button, I was moving a 5-inch thick volume of correspondence back and forth, struggling to get the appropriate pages in view. Finally I gave up, relinquished my seat, ate lunch, and went home.

Today I’m not going to the archives; I’m having my weekly lunch with my friend/roommate. After I’ll explore St. John’s Wood, which I’ve been told has a lot of cute cafes where I’ll do some secondary reading.

I survived day 1 and it’s actually been a productive day. I went to the archives, probably a little later than I wanted to but I still got four hours in comfortably. I did good work although I still need to figure how I’m going to combine transcribing documents with digital photos.

I also installed Freeview in my friend’s apartment after the archives today. Freeview is this free digital tv service that the Brits have. All you do is purchase a special receiver (it’s fairly inexpensive), hook it up to the tv through the cable that was providing the basic five channels, and turn it on. Within five minutes, you have over 30 channels plus radio channels. Yesterday I was down on the Brits for shutting down everything on a Sunday at 5; Cambridge was a ghost town by 5. Today I’m all about the British: where else can you get good quality digital tv with so little effort?

I see today as the first day of my dissertation research here. I’ve taken a week off, in which I did little other than sit around, think, get settled, etc. I’m still paralyzed and overwhelmed about the project, about whether I should be doing this, about whether I can finish my degree but I feel like I can take baby steps now and somehow force myself to get back into action.

So this week, the goal is to go to the archives every day for four hours. From the time I enter the archives, I’ll stay there for four hours (including a reasonable lunch break) and I’ll leave.

Each day I’ll remind myself of one reason why I like my dissertation or one question I’m really interested in because I’ve lost a sense of why I’m doing this particular project in the personal and professional chaos of the past several weeks.

Hopefully I’ll get back into a rhythm and the summer will be productive. It needs to be because I had hoped to start writing a chapter in August and because I’m supposed to be setting up a meeting here in London with my advisor sometime this summer. Given how she and I are not on the same page, I’m not going to meet with her unless I have something to show her, whether it be written work or a detailed outline or something other than what I have now.

Funny enough, supergradstudent wrote a post this morning about archival work and how unique the process can be, depending on your individual work style and the regulations of each archive. It’s good food for thought. Her point about the individual regulations of archives is so crucial: I’ve never been in an archive that allowed scanners and this spring I spent a month and a half in an archive that charged about $0.70 for each picture I took with a digital camera. (Luckily, I’d asked about fees months before I arrived, so I had time to apply for additional funds.) But beyond things out of researchers’ control, how you work the archives depends on you and what you’re comfortable with. My first experience with archives four years ago taught me that I really hated coming back with boxes and boxes of printed documents. It was simply too daunting to have done all that work just to have to redo it in the bustle of the school year. Since then I’ve tried to avoid relying on the photocopy approach, preferring instead to take notes on my laptop. It’s a slower method but at least I have some sense of what’s in the documents and I generally have a sense of where to look for things. Transcribing the documents also allows me to search the text later. My last research trip demanded that I use my digital camera heavily, despite the fee, since the alternative would be to spend several months, maybe even a year trying to get the documents I needed. I’m still uncomfortable with this method, even though it’s quicker, because I don’t really know what I have, even though I was careful to take detailed notes. It’s a process of trial and error but I don’t really have a lot of time for error.

Living in London has its perks; the constant concern over money and expenses is not one of them. It’s amazing to me how much money can fly out of my hands even without being particularly extravagant. Now that I’m settling in, I’m making a much more conscious effort to stick to my daily budget.

A friend and I went to a local burger restaurant for dinner last night and you can imagine my excitement when I was given a “two for one burger” coupon for that restaurant as we walked into the shopping center. My friend and I were ecstatic that we got out of the restaurant with a £12 bill. But then, in the movie theater, pretty much at the same time, we both thought: ‘Wait a minute, we just spent $24 on two burgers, one order of fries, and one soda!”