Archive Page 2
the story continues…
I’m still enthralled with this year’s UK Big Brother, to the detriment of my sleep and research. At the moment, I’m fascinated by a hot-cold something-between-friends-and-lovers relationship between my favorite housemate (a Geordie) from the beginning of the show and a Brazilian student. Actually now, I think they’re closer to boyfriends than friends. Anyway, the situation I described in my last post did reach a conclusion. When I last wrote, Irish Lass and Iranian Fashionisto had begun spending quality time together under the nose of Wolverine, who’d been busy trying to outwit Hot Guy, who he saw as the true threat.
It turned out that Irish Lass did have a thing for Hot Guy. She was more attracted to him than she was to Iranian Fashionisto, despite the fact that she’d been kissing the latter. To make things worse, Iranian Fashionisto had truly fallen for her, to the point where he saw himself marrying her. (He also had had a girlfriend at the time, who he effectively broke up with on television.) The same night Irish Lass told Wolverine that she and Iranian Fashionisto had a little thing going, she tried to tell the latter that they were just friends with benefits. (She neglected to mention her feelings for Hot Guy, of course.)
Meanwhile, another housemate (who has turned out to be even worse than Irish Lass) told Hot Guy that Irish Lass didn’t like him and that she had something going on with Iranian Fashionisto. This was patently untrue, and while it wasn’t this housemate’s place to tell him the truth, she certainly didn’t need to lie either. A few nights later, Hot Guy, who was one of the more normal contestants this season, couldn’t be bothered to stay any longer. And so, a day after brilliantly taking down Wolverine in a verbal duel, he left the Big Brother House.
With Hot Guy no longer there for her to crush on, Irish Lass continued to spend time cozying up to Iranian Fashionisto, even though she knew his feelings were stronger than hers. In conversations with other housemates, she even went as far as to say that it didn’t matter if his girlfriend showed up because they were together. Even up to this point, I had no real issues with her; being in that house must be like being in a pressure cooker so some bad decisions are bound to happen. But finally, she went beyond the pale.
For weeks, I’d seen rumors that her ex-boyfriend of MTV reality show fame was going to be entering the house. He had some legal complications and it took them longer to let him into the house than expected. Had he gone in when first planned, Iranian Fashionisto wouldn’t have been in the picture. But once he and Irish Lass had started a little something, I thought it was irresponsible for the producers to send in American Boyfriend. But they’re not concerned with ethics, or even with the possibility that contestants might flee the scene and so he went in.
The second Irish Lass saw her ex, Iranian Fashionisto ceased to exist for her. She was back with American Boyfriend without a thought for the broken man she’d left behind. The real issue wasn’t that she went back to the ex-boyfriend she’d been talking about all season; it was that when he showed up, she didn’t even so much as throw a glance Iranian Fashionisto’s way, let alone speak to him. American Boyfriend, on the other hand, went outside to speak to the dejected housemate within the hour. Irish Lass didn’t speak to him until the next day. And that’s where me, and apparently the rest of the country, parted ways with her. Unfortunately for her, she was already up for eviction against Wolverine. Ever since she’d told him about her dalliance with Iranian Fashionisto, he’d been sulking in a corner for days. When American Boyfriend came in, Wolverine sprang back to life, claiming that he’d seen her for who she was and providing some false comfort for Iranian Fashionisto. It’s a testament to how loathed he was at the time that she was only evicted by 60% of the vote. Had she been up against anybody else, she would have been well into the 80-90% range.
American Boyfriend left an hour after she was evicted, claiming that he wanted my favorite housemate to win. But really he was in an impossible position. While he fit in surprisingly well with the housemates, the situation was so wretched that he would have been doomed, yet another reason why he should have entered when planned or not at all. He was tainted by the fact that she’d been so horrible to Iranian Fashionisto, even though he’d been nothing but reasonable. He would have been a goner the next week anyway.
As for Wolverine, he’s somehow managed to recuperate his image in the public eye and two weeks ago he saw off a wildly popular housemate who had been the bookies’ favorite to win for weeks. Nobody in the world thought Wolverine was going to stay; now he has a decent shot at winning. Iranian Fashionisto became another favorite, benefiting from sympathy over how Irish Lass treated him. But in the past week or so, he’s grown tiresome as he’s continued to refuse to participate in the nominations process that determines the people up for the public vote. He claims he’s not nominating because he wants to take himself out of the game (although he wants to stay in the house). He thinks continuing to have the public keep him in is the best way of doing this. Only problem is that every time he refuses to nominate, other housemates face the axe as punishment for his misdeeds. It all came to a head a few days ago when my fav lit into him over it. When Iranian Fashionisto tried to claim the high ground by prattling on about his moral code, my fav reminded him that he’d in fact cheated on his girlfriend on national television. Great stuff.
As it happened, Iranian Fashionisto miscalculated. According to his tortured logic, he couldn’t nominate because if he nominated the person he wanted to, that person would have received more votes than him and he wanted to ensure he was in the mix. By not nominating, he believed he and this other person would have the same number of votes, putting them in the eviction lineup along with Wolverine. Not so fast, Iranian Fashionisto. This other contestant was never going to be up because Iranian Fashionisto had received enough votes before he pulled this unnecessary nominations stunt. Oops. So this week either he or Wolverine’s out.
The house all think my favorite is going to win, largely because he has a very tragic medical situation in his family. I’d love him to win (and I loved him from the start before I found out about the situation) but I don’t think he will. Viewers seem to be quite turned off by his jokey demeanor and the way he often pushes pranks too far. He’s also suffering from unflattering editing that reduces his arguments with the Brazilian to the moments of explosive rage at the exclusion of what provoked these incidents, the aftermath of them, or even the basic timeline of when they fight and when they’ve made up. If I weren’t one of the losers losing sleep because I watch overnight live feed, I’d miss how complicated and genuine their situation is or how my fav means well but is a bit misguided and insecure. (In fact, because of a particularly abysmal edit two weeks ago, I’m even more cynical about reality tv than I already was.) There are only about ten days left and it’s still all to play for. My best guess is that either the Brazilian or Wolverine will win. If Wolverine hangs on this week, I see him potentially going all the way.
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and now for a story…
Since I write under a pseudonym, my blog isn’t quite as good a representation of myself as maybe it should be. I tend to write more about writing and research because they’re activities that can be hashed out in some detail without getting too specific about the subject matter I study. But I haven’t written as much about one of my true loves, pop culture, especially television. So I may write more about television. I am a bonafide television whore and I am not ashamed of it. I proudly watch too much television, a lot of it reality. Right now, I’m obsessed with the UK version of Big Brother.
I’ve watched some portion of BBUK every summer save one since my very first research trip for my senior thesis. I’ve come to associate research trips with Big Brother, which is going to be a problem when it ends, likely next year. BBUK was practically very useful because it was, for me, the first exposure I had to the different accents in the UK. As anyone who’s spent a significant time in the UK knows, for such a small country, there’s a stunning amount of accent diversity, some of which are almost unintelligible to the untrained American ear. There’s Scottish of course, but the Geordie accent (a personal favorite of mine, from Northeast England, up around Newcastle) and the Scouse accent (around Liverpool) are particularly difficult. The Mancunian and Yorkshire/Lancashire accents are distinctive but generally pretty understandable. I’ve gotten fairly good at telling where somebody’s from based on their accent but that wouldn’t have happened without BB. (For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure there are more distinctive regional accents in the UK than there are in the US, which only really has a few standout ones. The amount of country covered by a general southern accent, for example, the thickness of which doesn’t actually correlate to state, is many times over the size of the UK.)
So there was that. But BBUK is just endlessly fascinating television in a way its US counterpart is not. Here’s why. First, there’s the fame element. Unlike in the US, being a housemate makes some people a minor celebrity. The late Jade Goody was the most successful at this but she was certainly not the only housemate to parlay her time on the show into magazine deals and the like. So the show attracts really outsized characters with delusions of grandeur who have fame in the back of their minds; this encourages them to behave in a ridiculous and wildly entertaining manner.
But there’s a more substantive difference. The US version is all about strategy and gameplay. Who wins is determined by the players themselves and so it becomes a 24-hr strategy session. Everybody’s there to win the money. The UK version is completely different. There is no worse crime to housemates than having a “game plan” and people who behave as though they’re there only to win the money are uniformly criticized (even though of course they want the money.) The television audience determines who’s evicted each week and who wins by a phone vote. The only part housemates play in the process is when they nominate fellow housemates for eviction and even then, routine BB punishments often involve putting up housemates for eviction. Moreover, housemates are strictly forbidden from talking about nominations. If they do so, they generally find themselves up for eviction themselves. So there are no 24 hour strategy sessions, save some rudimentary attempts at code that BB quickly susses out. When the strategy element is taken out, the only thing left is the interactions between housemates.
Why am I writing about this? Well because I love the show. But also because what started out as a pretty humdrum season has become some of the best television in the past week. (The other thing about BB is that you do have to commit. It’s every single night of the week for at least an hour, plus nightly live feed, which has ruined my work schedule. While I’m sure a lot of viewers do come in and out, you never know when something’s going to develop out of the blue and, for me at least, the joy is in watching things slowly develop over weeks. That’s generally why I prefer serial dramas and soaps like EastEnders over anything else. I just love good stories.) I’m not going to use names b/c I don’t want a lot of traffic from random googlers but those interested will be able to figure out who I’m talking about through a basic wikipedia search.
Here’s the story.
Let’s start with a housemate I’ll call Irish Lass. Irish Lass spent some time on one of the more recent Real Worlds, where she dated one of the contestants down under. Irish Lass is mixed race and beautiful in that girl next door kind of way. Although two other housemates had a relationship for several weeks until one was evicted, Irish Lass is more interesting because virtually every straight man in that house has “fancied” her, as did one woman. The first housemate to fancy her declared he was falling in love with her and then proceeded to follow her around for weeks. Irish Lass didn’t cut him off soon enough and, to some degree, she encouraged it but he was eventually evicted.
Moving on to guy two; he’s a person of interest so he’ll get a name. This character is ridiculous. He’s quite unattractive, which wouldn’t be a problem if he didn’t insist on having a huge mullet ponytail and gigantic mutton chop sideburns modeled after Wolverine, which is the name he’s going to get. In that typical way of cocky men, Wolverine thinks he’s a catch and also thinks he’s the smartest person in the house. (As he stated in the diary room, he didn’t think Big Brother was going to be able to find anybody as cool as him.) He has a caveman-like lurch about him (complete with a lot of sleeveless shirts), which he has used to full effect to lay claim to being one of the leaders of the house. Worse, Wolverine is prone to lecherous and degrading statements about women, bolstered no doubt by his conviction that he’s God’s gift to women.
Wolverine has fancied Irish Lass for weeks but unlike guy #1, he made himself indispensable to her. See, Irish Lass has had quite a bit of trouble making friends with the women in the house and she wasn’t too popular for letting the situation with guy #1 go on too long. Wolverine then became her only friend and biggest confidant and they started having numerous long conversations, sometimes under duvets, about her position in the house. (She’s told him numerous times that she’s not interested but he insists she is and the fact that she’s so isolated in the house has worked to his advantage.) A few weeks ago, she got into a huge fight with another guy in the house (another person of interest who will get a name in a minute) that turned much of the hosue against her. Wolverine of course has tried to milk that isolation by being the only person she could turn to. He tries to make her feel guilty about hanging out with anybody else, telling her that she’s too stupid if she doesn’t see how they’re trying to use her.
So that was the status quo as of last week. Mildly interesting, yes, but it was pretty clear how it was all going to end. Wolverine’s frustration would cause him to lash out at her, causing an ugly scene; that’s if one of them hadn’t been evicted first. Neither of them are too popular with the public. I’d have watched this with some vague interest because I’m a hardcore fan but its predictability did not make for good drama. Irish Lass was never going to be interested in Wolverine and because Wolverine is a nasty piece of work, I wasn’t going to feel bad when it all busted up.
There’s another standard trick that BBUK does that BBUS never does and that’s add loads of new housemates several weeks into the show. That’s what happened last week. Of the five new housemates, in came Hot Guy. Now I don’t actually think Irish Lass was planning to do anything with Hot Guy and Hot Guy is actually pretty cool so he wasn’t looking for drama. But Wolverine got it into his head that his territory was threatened and so he’s begun a smear campaign against hot guy. He’s also begun to lurk around around Irish Lass considerably more. In the time that he’s been trying to dispatch the person he sees as his biggest threat, he’s missed the actual threat. And this is where things got interesting.
Another of the outsize personalities on the show is a man I’ll call Iranian Fashionisto. There’s really no way to describe this man other than he plays around with clothes, makeup, hats, and his hair in a very interesting way. This is going to sound really cheesy but it’s clear he views his body as a canvas. In my mind, he usually pulls it off but I could see others having a different opinion about him. What distinguishes Iranian Fashionisto from Wolverine is that while the former is indeed quite confident in himself, he doesn’t feel the need to be in control of the situation. He’s generally a chill dude. Iranian Fashionisto and Irish Lass had a big bustup a few weeks ago, as I mentioned, probably the biggest ruckus of the season. Now Wolverine and Iranian Fashionisto are tight, although when Wolverine was trying to isolate Irish Lass, he told her that he thought Iranian Fashionisto fancied her. But after the fight, it was pretty clear that Irish Lass and Iranian Fashionisto were struggling to spend time in the same room.
So while Wolverine has spent much of the past week rallying people against the hot guy he thinks has designs on Irish Lass, Tuesday night, Irish Lass and Iranian Fashionisto get a spare moment to themselves. (Remember Wolverine has constantly been lurking.) Come to find out, Irish Lass and Iranian Fashionisto are totally into each other; they talked around the issue in less than convincing code. Never would have seen this coming. But yesterday it got even better.
While all of this was going on, another of the new housemates had been having a bit of a breakdown over what he thought was a message from his girlfriend, an original housemate who had been evicted ten minutes after he’d arrived. He decided to escape from the BB house Wednesday night/Thursday morning in dramatic fashion by scrambling over the wall and lowering himself down from the roof. Wolverine helped him do this and was punished yesterday by having to spend who knows how long in a makeshift jail cell in the house garden. He was there well into the night which gave Irish Lass and Iranian Fashionisto ample time to get quite cozy. No need to describe further. At the very same time, Wolverine continued his campaign against Hot Guy, talking endlessly to some other housemates about how Hot Guy had designs on Irish Lass. Wolverine continued to insist that he knew everything that was going on in the house, although he said that it was amazing how much you could miss while you were outside. Even then, though, he believed he was on top of every situation. Of course the camera kept cutting back and forth between Wolverine’s macho guff and Irish Lass and Iranian Fashionisto. Utter brilliance.
Whereas last week the inevitable blowup between Wolverine and Irish Lass had a predictable conclusion, now the plot’s gotten thicker because Iranian Fashionisto is one of Wolverine’s trusted comrades. Meanwhile Iranian Fashionisto and Irish Lass have to try to hide what’s going on between them. How long is it going to take for Wolverine to find out what’s going on or will they be successful in hiding it until he’s evicted? (He could possibly be gone as early as next week if he’s not up against the one housemate most disliked by viewers.) How long is Wolverine going to keep up the campaign against Hot Guy? If other housemates find out, will they keep the secret or tell Wolverine? Finally, I’m hooked.
Seriously, you couldn’t script this shit if you tried.
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should be celebrating…
I just finished writing another chapter…I might say a bit more about that in another post.
I should be happy about it; and really I am. But instead of relaxing, I’m just drowning in frustration. I’m not going to get into all the ways I’m frustrated at the moment but there are many. I’m frustrated with the small things and the big things and I’ve got nowhere to vent. I’d scream but it’s well after midnight and I’m not the only person who lives here. I’d throw things but this isn’t my house.
So I guess I’m going to be up for another few hours, watching BB live feed, eating desserts, and generally trying to defuse before I go to bed at 3 in the morning.
It’s really not good that this is an all-too-familiar pattern.
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checking in
I’ve actually started writing and I’m forcing myself to finish this chapter by early next week. Nothing much to say about that.
The all-consuming thought in my mind now is that I only have about two months left here and then I have to return to the US and to my university. There’s little I want to do less than return to my university. Most, though not all, of my friends will not be there. Barring a miracle, I will have no dating life. It’s not as though I have a robust friend network here or a vibrant dating life. I don’t. But there’s a sense of possibility here that I didn’t have when I was living in MRU town. Here, you never know when you’re going to walk into a cafe and see the most stunning man. There, not so much. I’d live elsewhere but I can’t afford to live in an apartment by myself in the places that would make the most sense. And that really is the key: my absolute priority is to live by myself, something I’ve never done. I’ve always lived in dorms, dormlike houses, or rented rooms. I can’t take myself seriously as an adult as long as I don’t have my own place. So there’s a tradoff that I’m making: feel like an adult and have the privacy I desperately want at the expense of living in a place that I have a shot in hell of enjoying. Perhaps that’s why I keep going back to this cafe (where nothing’s happening, I might add, b/c said man seems to work at this establishment infrequently). It’s not as though I think a ton is going to happen here but I know deep down that even less is going to happen once I leave London. So before I go into a two-year hibernation, I’m giving this as much of a full-faith effort as I can (which, really, wouldn’t be the kind of effort others would give).
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losing the battle
I’ve taken a few weeks off from the archives to write up a very rough draft of one of my chapters. It’s the second week of this break and I still haven’t begun actual writing. Once again, the challenge of reading through these sources is so mammoth that I have determined my general argument and a rough structure of the chapter itself way before I’ve finished reading sources pertinent to that argument and structure. In some ways that’s good; I’ve found that my arguments are more sophisticated when they gradually come into view in light of the material I’m reading than when time’s run out and I have to put something down, contradictory evidence be damned. But it’s frustrating as well; the last thing I want to do right now is read more sources. I just want to dive into the part I like most about doing history: writing it. I’ve attempted to skip as much as I can, stuff where information is repeated or where the information is no longer pertinent to the argument. But there are some things that just can’t be skipped: reports that get to the very heart of my question.
I really need this to be the last week of reading sources; ideally I’d actually start writing by Thursday, but that’s not looking very likely. I’m pretty sure I can bang out a (very) rough draft in about a week’s time. But I just can’t justify spending much more than three weeks on this chapter. The end of my research time is fast approaching and while I do have almost two months left here, I also have a ton of research still to do. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before but one of the difficult things to do in a long-term research trip is manage one’s time. I find it especially difficult because I’m not a morning person, I’m not particularly disciplined, and I’m prone to weeks-long spells of research inactivity. All those issues are tied to the chaos in my personal life and the solutions for any of those problems aren’t clear. For the moment, they’re just features of my life that I have to accept and work around.
The point is that now that I see an actual argument shaping up and now that the end point of my research trip is closer, I feel a strong urgency to get this damn thing written.
Today I started to tackle the biggest remaining file that I have to read. The file is so large that I broke the photographs of it into five separate pdfs; in total, there are about 500 photographs. Quite a few of the photographs aren’t particularly clear, despite my best efforts. (I took the pictures on the highest resolution my camera has and also took two pictures per page, top and bottom. Quite time consuming in the archives, I might add.) This file has a big report in it that I really shouldn’t skip; it’s one of the most detailed essays on the events in question. But as I started, it just became clear that this was a mammoth task. Some of the handwriting’s difficult to decipher, the ink is faint, the two pictures per page make it very difficult to read. Add to that the typical floridness of the period, where a lot is written and little substance is conveyed but it’s not clear just how little is being said until you’ve read it all. The longer I’ve been working on it, the more I’ve skipped, always writing notes to myself that I’ll come back to this or that section when it comes time to revise. And finally I wrote, “I just cannot do this right now.”
The source has defeated me.
In the long run, I’m not worried about it. I’ll return to this document along with other stuff I’ve set aside when I’m in full-time writing mode. In a way I had not expected, it’s become clear to me why it’s so difficult to write and do research at the same time. I’d been adamant that I wasn’t going to be one of those graduate students who returned from the field with thousands upon thousands of unread photographs, photocopies, or pages of notes. Those students generally took a few (or several) years after archival research to finish their dissertations and, for many reasons, I knew I needed to be done with graduate school as quickly as I could write a good dissertation. And I’m very glad I didn’t wait until I returned to start writing. I’m pretty sure I’m doing better research because I started writing plus I’ve got a sense of where I’m going that I wouldn’t have if I just sat down to my unread sources without a clue in the fall. That being said, though, I was a bit glib about how difficult it would be to balance the two. My time writing is overshadowed by a need to not let the writing take away too much time from research. My time researching is overshadowed by the question about when I’m going to start writing. My time here is not unlimited and each of those tasks is time-consuming and emotionally draining in its own right.
It’s also worth asking whether I must write this chapter right this second. Technically, no. But my advisor is waiting for a chapter and the longer it takes me, the more worried I get about how the advisor sees me. But even more important than that, I’ve gotten to the point where I have to write this chapter now. I’ve read so much of the sources, I’ve thought about it for well over a month. It’s like that feeling when something’s on the tip of your tongue, only that something is an entire chapter. It will drive me bonkers if I don’t get it written.
So write it I will, without this really important source. I’ll have lots of footnotes saying how I have yet to read this, which I’m sure will go down a treat with the advisor. But then again, the advisor has made it clear that structure and argument are more important at this point that complete mastery of the evidence, so I’m not fully in the wrong here. Plus if I mention that it would have taken me several weeks to go through this file properly, I’m pretty sure the advisor will prefer to get written work sooner rather than later.
Sorry for the length.
Filed under: dissertation, my life, research, writing | 3 Comments
camouflage
I realized yesterday just how much I’ve become attached to being able to blend in here. I had dinner with a friend from the US yesterday; this friend has a particularly American presence. Tall, slightly louder on public transit, friendly in that very American way, among other subtleties. I focus on presence here because I have a strong American (though not regional) accent so the jig is up once I open my mouth. I’m completely fine with that but I do love not being pegged as an American the second I step outside. Anyway, when I was with my friend, I felt unusually uncomfortable because I could no longer blend into my surroundings. And I felt bad because I was judging the friend as though I were British. It was weird.
I’m not one of those people who slips in and out of accents. I’m too inhibited for that and I think it’s horribly tacky and strange when people do it. But I’ve done a similar transition: I’m starting to think and behave like a Brit, or at least like a Londoner. I’ve gotten very used to moving through the city in my own little world, with my headphones on, and with a purpose. Nobody’s going to say anything to me; I don’t have to say anything to them. It’s wonderful. So even though I was talking to somebody I knew, it was weird to be riding on the tube and talking to anybody, let alone to be talking at a slightly louder volume than I would normally with the few British friends I have.
And yes, I’m a horribly judgmental person but there’s not a ton I can do about that.
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a random smattering
- Per usual, now that the end is in sight of this research trip, I’m upping my game. If I want to be successful in this profession, I have to stop lazing about until I have two or three months left and then clicking into gear.
- I’m not sure if I’ve gained actual weight but I’ve been feeling particularly sluggish and heavy lately. That needs to get sorted.
- People who handle the problems life hands them without getting completely broken in the process impress me. I find it impossible to remain anything close to happy for any significant length of time.
- Wimbledon is considerably less interesting to me now that Rafael Nadal’s not playing, a decision of his that I completely support. (Frankly, for several years now, I’ve been questioning his insane playing schedule.) That said, as much as I love the Brits, I just can’t get behind this Andy Murray buzz so I’m hitching my horse to the Roger bandwagon.
- The last twenty minutes of the Real Housewives of New Jersey finale last week were genius. The best thing I’ve watched in 2009.
- I’m trying a new writing method for the chapter I need to finish in the next few weeks. I’m taking handwritten notes on the sources rather than the more free form musings I’d done for the last chapter. But again I’m at the same problem: too many sources to read so that the process of writing drags out much longer than my advisor would like. Maybe that’s less about my writing style and more about the unmanageability of my project. I shudder to think what’s going to happen when/if I begin to develop a second book project. Isn’t that the time you really go for broke?
- While I continue to take horrid care of myself, at least I have booked a weeklong vacation/writing retreat/getting away from it all trip to my favorite part of the UK. Cannot wait.
- As for cute guy in the cafe, that whole thing caused me much anxiety a few weeks ago. Then I stopped caring and am relatively cool about the whole thing. That being said, although I’ve been to the cafe several times since first seeing him, he’s been there only one of those times. Such a waste of eyeshadow.
- Music: really loving La Roux, Agnes, and Lady Gaga’s Paparazzi (though not Lady Gaga herself)
That’s enough for now, I think.
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this seems impossible…
but I think I might have a good (and not just functional) relationship with an advisor who has my back and is excited about my work. And I haven’t switched advisors. I’m overwhelmed by this new development and somewhat dazed but I can’t deny it anymore: we’ve turned a corner and now things are good, actually bordering on great.
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this could be interesting
Yesterday I had coffee with one of my male friends at a cafe where a very hot man works. I’ve been to this place before but I’d never seen this guy. And, as would be my luck, I was with a man. I looked at this guy repeatedly during my conversation with my friend and he seemed to be looking at me. So tomorrow I’m going back, just to see. I’m keeping my hopes as low as possible; these things never turn out in my favor. I’m telling myself he has a girlfriend, unless I find out otherwise. But I’ll be putting on makeup (something I only do if I’m going clubbing) and otherwise going out of my way in the hopes of seeing this guy again. What I’ll do if he’s there again other than smile, I don’t know. I’m incredibly, almost pathetically, self-conscious and shy when it comes to this stuff so I’m making no promises that there will be an extended conversation or that I’ll “flirt.” It will be a major step for me if I just get myself there with eyeliner/shadow on.
Fingers crossed this doesn’t turn out badly.
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breaktime
It should come as no surprise to longtime readers that I have a hard time taking care of myself. I work, work, work until I can’t any more, at which point months can go by without much productiveness. The idea of taking a break is foreign to me. My family never took vacations. We were too poor to nor were we a close enough family. The idea of me, my mother, and my father spending hours in a car together (or flying somewhere together) and sightseeing and generally hanging out as a family is laughable and ludicrous: I can’t imagine a more horrible and awkward situation. I’m going to avoid specifics here but let’s just say that my mother didn’t take care of herself either and forced herself to live through and endure a number of situations that boggle the mind, the final of which killed her. So I don’t really know how to take care of myself, whether it’s taking vacations, taking weekends off, going to the doctor when I need to, figuring out how to sleep better, etc. My default position has been to ignore problems as they come up, bury myself in work when I can, and hope that it won’t all blow up in my face. In fairness to myself, that approach got me through college and got me through the first four years of graduate school but it’s been ugly and the price has been steep.
Why do I bring this up now? I have roughly three months left of this research trip, the last major one for the dissertation. I’ll have to return to Global South Country briefly at some point and of course I’ll come back to London at least once before it’s all over but for the most part, this is it. With this deadline looming, I’m feeling the pressure to buckle down. So I’d planned to work right up until I leave, with tons of time in the archives plus tons of time writing. And then I realized that I just can’t do that. I cannot work nonstop right up until I leave. Next semester is going to be insane: I have to rent an apartment for the first time ever, furnish it, write and present my first major conference paper, plan the trip to GSC, write a few chapters, apply for a whole host of fellowships, and keep an eye on the job market. (I’m not planning to go on the job market fully but if something good’s around, I need to be ready for it.) All that while dealing with my normally tumultuous personal life and whatever else may happen. So now I’m trying to be okay with the fact that it’s okay for me to stop doing research in mid-August. I’m not there quite yet. What am I going to do for two weeks? Shouldn’t I be maximizing my time here?
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