Archive for February, 2008
chaos is not becoming
Happy Leap Day!
It’s been a crazy week. All attempts to be productive were thwarted by personal and professional chaos. Actually both situations can’t be discussed in great detail because it’s best that I be discrete about them to some degree. The professional matter first: I’m a month from leaving the country [...]
Filed under: dissertation, my life | Leave a Comment
transitioning
The most difficult thing about the third year of graduate school is trying to transition into the more adult work schedule required to write a dissertation. My work habits during the coursework phase of the program were chaotic but somehow focused. Work was more focused because all I had to do was look at the [...]
Filed under: academia broadly, my life | 3 Comments
tv’s back
Somehow I never managed to write about the tv strike so now that it’s over, it’s as good a time as any to say a few words. I’m actually surprised by how little the strike affected me. Of course, most of my standard shows disappeared. But I realized that most of these shows I didn’t [...]
Filed under: pop culture | Leave a Comment
American Idol, part 2
I stand by what I said yesterday about Idol. It applied again tonight. Does anybody doubt that Asia’h wouldn’t have been nearly as entertaining if she had sung a slow song??? Peppy songs cover subpar vocals almost every time.
Filed under: pop culture | 2 Comments
American Idol, part 1
I love TV and I have a love/hate relationship with American Idol. It’s fascinating TV even if it does monopolize my television life for five months. But here’s my problem: it’s the round of 24 and we’re subjected to three nights a week. That’s a lot of singing! Even though I have a good memory [...]
Filed under: pop culture | 3 Comments
Welcome to the February edition of the Gradual Progress Carnival. By now, even the slowest universities are well into the second semester (or quarter) of the year, which often means that many graduate students are in the thick of work, teaching, deadlines, and defenses. As a result, there’s been a lot of blog talk about [...]
Filed under: carnival of gradual progress | 4 Comments
rebounding…
Now that I have even less motivation to do work these next two months (months that I had not expected to be in town), I need to get onto some sort of work regimen to make some progress on the dissertation. So I’m setting the goal of waking up at 9 each morning except weekends [...]
Filed under: my life | Leave a Comment
bad decisions
What do you do when you finally allow yourself to accept the fact that you made a bad decision about the graduate school you chose to attend, particularly when it’s too late to fix the situation?
I should never have come to this institution for graduate work. My work straddles a few regional, national, and thematic [...]
Filed under: academia broadly, my life | 3 Comments
I don’t know what it is about the word “epistemology” and its derivatives that makes me always run to the dictionary to check out its meaning (I could say the same for “heuristic” as well). Every single time I see those words, even when I remember having looked them up the last time I [...]
Filed under: academia broadly | 2 Comments
