Revision stage and some whining

I mean, massive revision stage. I have less than a month to rewrite several parts of my dissertation. My advisor said that at this point the diss is undefensible, which is pretty scary news, and we're going into triage mode. I mean, I've been working on my introduction revision for the past week, and that's only a start. I haven't even begun the conclusion.

so my timeline for the next three months is:

May: massive revisions

June: waiting with baited breath until my June 23rd defense

July: more revisions with a deadline of July 20 to get everything in to the graduate school. Provided that I pass the defense.

I really though that Paul wouldn't let me schedule a defense date if he didn't think I could pass, but I guess I was wrong.

update on the diss

Here's the deal. I'm writing my chapters out of order, purposely. Chapter 2 needs some revision work, but apparently, as Paul told me on Friday, Chapter 1 just needs a quick spin around the block to get some kinks worked out. Now I'm drafting Chapter 3. Well, not right now. It's due at the end of January, but I'm pretty sure I can bang it out by the end of this month.

He also thinks that this thing could be 150–200 pages (rather than the 250–300 pages he mentioned in the past), and he suggested that I address only works in the silent period. So we're looking at about a total of 6 chapters with an afterword to sum everything up. The goal now is for me to defend (i.e., to answer lots of hard questions during a 2-hour period, which I dread) in July and graduate in August. These are goals I can meet.

Writing

As you all know, I'm working pretty hard on the diss. Watching movies is still fun—we saw Yes Man last night—but writing isn't so much fun anymore.

This is to say that I might take a little break from the blog. Otherwise, I'll just use it as a forum for complaint and self-doubt. Which I'm feeling a lot of lately.

A little back patting

Today I was thinking about what I've done during the past three months since I've been out of the hospital. It's not a long list, and it's not in order of importance or date, but it means something to me, and I thought I'd share it with you. [I know that's totally a run-on sentence.]

• I found a psychiatrist and a psychologist. They make up my international mental health team.
• I renewed my commitment to Sam in front of our families and closest friends. It was awesome.
  
• I presented some of my work before an audience of my colleagues, and I got thoughtful questions that showed they were listening. I was (this part is important) able to answer them. So there.
• I made out the checks for my hospital stay, the ambulance, and another mental health bill. Get this: there's a Vanderbilt Medical Group and a Vanderbilt Medical Hospital, and they both billed us. And riding in an ambulance is not nearly as cool as one might think but it's also less expensive.
• I applied for and got student loans, a labyrinthine process.
• I gained a little weight, but it's not meds weight, so I'll be able to slowly take it off.
• I got a new tattoo. 
• I started working on the diss again. Although I sometimes panic about my topic and its scope, it's good to be seriously working again. It's especially good to be working in a healthy way, without mania.

So that's my list. I don't feel that productive, but looking at the things I've done makes me realize that my therapist is right: I am getting stronger.

Anniverse

Last March, I started writing this blog. I was beginning to feel better (I thought), and I had some stuff to say. For example, I noted that my blood serum level for lithium was on the low end of therapeutic but that Chris said it was fine when combined with lamictal. How wrong was that!

The onset of mania often escapes notice, masquerading as just feeling better. Looking back, I see that last April marked the peak of blog-writing, coming in at 21 posts. I made a little graph to test a hypothesis: did the number of blog posts for each month indicate vacillating moods? The results are in. Last April (21), September (14), and this February (10) look like spikes in an otherwise downward trend. I should say, however, that May's posts were fewer than April's, but they were prolix. It's an illustration of how mood works in me. More posts mean more to say, but fewer posts can still mean pressured speech and a desire to get out all of the stuff I have to say, all at once.

I don't know what counts as the onset of mania and what just counts as feeling better. I don't know how to measure how I feel, even, as I wrote some posts that seemed lighter in tone because I was hiding my misery so that no one stopped me from fulfilling my plans. When mood is the question, nothing becomes an answer.

Insurance

Is scary. They list everything they might cover, what they plan to cover, but I want them to be a little more definitive. Okay, a lot more definitive. 

In other news, I'm loving Kimya Dawson. And I'm remembering that accessaries aren't so bad. 

I'm still trying to figure out a lot of things and to recall more things about my recent experiences. I want to learn how to express more love. Oddly, I don't myself have a lexicon for love, for which flaw I blame my parents. It's the only dependable use they have. 

This blog has several different kinds of posts, and to my mind, right now, the current trend is toward edited, thought-out entries and sprawling posts, with little oversight and lots of digression and spilling-over sentiments. Sometimes the later kind transform their ideas and emotions so that a more carefully crafted post can contain them. Sometimes it's all just raw.

Ground rules

Okay, here are some ground rules in the crazy-person hospital: no alcohol of any type, including that which is found in shampoo, toothpaste, and deodorant; no computers, which means no working; no cigarettes, no laces for shoes; no belts; no personal connections among patients. Some of these rules worked better than others. I mean, there's a reason why deodorant has alcohol in it.

Some ground rules for this blog: no pulling punches; no publishing all of my nut-case journal entries; no editing for length when content is more important (in other words, I can be much more wordy than I am here); no hiding from myself or from you, my friends.

I must ask you to abide one rule: please comment, even if only to indicate that you've read what I've written. Blogging can be a lonely pursuit. I imagine that someone reads any of this and finds meaning in it, but in my heart, conjecture rules. I imagine the worst, and silence can turn into anything, really. 

So, please comment, please. Even if only to tell me that you get the message. It doesn't have to be complex. Just let me know you're out there.

First day: 1/26

Caution: What follows is raw, like a wound that seeps. Names are changed to protect sinners and saints, mostly because sometimes you get both in one package. This is a portion of what I wrote, and it is perhaps the most palpable for me. It tells one of the sets of feelings associated with my suicide. 

My life is unmanageable. I'm powerless over my bipolar disorder. How could I not be? I need to find a way to manage not just my bipolar disorder but how I feel about my bipolar disorder. C. talks about remission, like cancer. The word itself is connected to the word intermission, a short break that happens once. Between the large portions of time. Remission may happen more than once, and the concomitant is that depression and mania may happen again and again. I'm still fairly young, and the prospect of experiencing this set of feelings again and again is enormity itself. So my life, my disorder, my moods and thoughts are unmanageable. I am powerless.

On 1/26 I began writing in a journal, which serves now as a memory device. I'll try not to edit the very difficult stuff. I wrote a lot on 1/26 because Dr. M took me off all meds, including meds for sleep. I was pissed the entire night. Next, Part 2 of this same day, in which I explain the various kinds of bipolar disorder.

First, some categorization

In the first few posts, I'm going to try to convey what happened in VITA (Vanderbilt Institute for the Treatment of Addiction). I was in that ward because the other adult wards had no available beds. It was actually quite useful to be in the VITA ward. For once, I was the sane person in a room full of crazies. More on the ward itself later. First, some sense of the schedule.

• Vital signs: blood pressure, pulse, and temperature. They collected these "signs" three times a day: 6:00a, 9:50a, 3:15p
• Meals three times a day: 7:45a, 12:00p, 5:15p
• Groups: 9:00a, 11:00a, 1:00p, 4:00p, 6:30p, 8:00p. The last time I list here was devoted to AA meetings. 
• Sleep: lights out at 11:00p, with little dispensation.
• Other activities filled up the spaces in between. Here are the times that were unstructured: 8:15a–9:00a, 10:15a–11:00a, 12:30p–1:00p, 2:00p–4:00p, 6:30p–8:00p, 9:00p–11:00p. A total of just over 7 hours, dispersed through the day. Part-time time you might say.

In the coming days, I'll encapsulate material from my journal. Much of it is raw. Some of it may be crude reckoning of my faults, but I hope that by evaluating it, I'll remember how dangerous and terrible were the events that got me to this point in time. Finally, I may give additional commentary on those journal entries that are unfair or unreasonable.

Please know that I do this to help, not to indulge in self-pity, or punishment, or in any way boastful. I deeply regret what I did.

Next, an account from the inside

For the next weeks, I'll write about what I found in my journal. It'll hasten (I hope) my catharsis. I hope it will ease your own. 

It wasn't Mary who was contrary

I was a resistant child. Whenever my mother told me to do something faster, I slowed down. Regardless of what started this reaction, it's become a reflex for me. An authoritative deman doesn't even have to be stated--any tacit requirement or exhortation can be cause for rebellion. An example: I know Sam hates to be late, and I love him and want him to be happy; however, this knowledge and love does not keep me from dawdling when we have to be somewhere. It's a pretty terrible thing to do and difficult to work against, for me and for others.

I resist even my own self-directed urging. I know I have to write. I want myself to write, and I chose to be at Vanderbilt so that I can do this work. I chose this work. I need to get it done, and I will feel so much better afterwards. If I can just get started on it, I'll even enjoy it. I love doing this work.

But that certainty does not quell the voice of my six-year-old self: "I don't want to. You can't make me. Ow! Stop pinching me! Okay, I'll do it, I guess." 

Contrary. Intractible. Recalcitrant. Truculent. Obstinate. Obdurate. Stubborn. Headstrong.

Headstrong's good. Now, if we can only phase-shift that quality into a more productive kind of determination, maybe I can trick myself. 

Bonus: a new phrase I learned today is "lissajous curve." Here's an example of one.

A reply to J-P's comment on the previous post

My response was getting so long that it made more sense to put it into a comment of its own. The Kindle (and devices like it) probably are boons to inveterate travelers. Books are heavy!

J-P, the questions you ask regarding paper books generally provoke tons of (let's say) vigorous discourse in my field. I could definitely imagine a future in which owning paper books becomes a luxury, a electronic books and their attendant devices drop in price. Just as it is now a luxury to own a horse for now good reason. (Also heavy.)

I believe that the codex (even if not made with paper) will and should endure, but that we'll use it differently, perhaps with more respect or shared ownership within a community. Codices resist change and censorship more easily than electronic documents do. The paper book signifies a drain to our environment, but how does that compare to the environmental impact of producing, distributing, and recycling electronic devices and the infrastructure that they require? (That might be an unanswerable question at this point.)

What I do know is that many codices are beautiful in themselves. As are those luxury horses. (But with less poop.)

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And now a question regarding my own crappy paperback codices: Does anyone know how to get one's paperbacks re-covered to make them hardbacks? Most of our books are paperbacks, and I like to imagine them as cloth-covered hardbacks, in a range of colors. As a child, I lusted after the huge library of leather-bound books that belonged to one of my father's colleagues. They had a pleasing uniformity of size and color, with exotic names on their spines, like "Seneca" (an Indian chief?) and "Cato the Elder." Now I know I don't want any leather books or the authors in their canon. But it's really cool to think of a cloth-covered canon of our own. So if any of you people know where I could get this done, or anyone on Etsy who would do it, please let me know.

First, the voting; second, my self-centered celebration

Sam and I voted last Monday. Organizations that try to get out the vote offer a lot of reasons: doing your civic duty, taking advantage of a right that we cherish, changing the current regime, crack. (My thanks to John Oliver and Acorn for that last one.) They add up to the same basic tenet, that without individual action and participation in government, America ceases to exist. The U.S. as we know it ceases to exist. Representative democracy evaporates, without which our constitutional republic fails. Regardless of party, no one (I honestly believe) wants an oligarchy. 

Every time I watch one of those commercials for voting or for voting (like the one Tiffany has up on her blog right now) and Obama, I think about the one thing that ties U.S. citizens together. It's not culture, it's not region, it's not attitudes or values, it's not even geography. Why would I identify myself as connected with someone living hundreds of miles from me in one direction (Houston, TX: 856 mi) more than someone in a different distant direction (Toronto, ON: 774 mi) or another (soldiers in Iraq)? Because we all get to see who our next President will be on Tuesday. We all participate in the same government, the same political experiment.

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In other news, I got great feedback on my most recent draft. A wonderful feeling.

On the apparent multiplication of things I don't know

Lately, I've been feeling a little dull. Here is an instantiation meant to reproduce this feeling:  

Jorge Luis Borges wrote a little story called "The Garden of the Forking Paths." (You can probably find it online.) The key mystery, if you can call it a mystery, surrounds Dr. Yu Tsun's ancestor, Ts'ui Pen, who undertook a double task: to write an intricate novel and to construct an equally intricate labyrinth. In both, everyone would lose his way. Someone murdered Ts'ui Pen before he completed the novel, and the labyrinth was never found. Other stuff happens in the story, which is quite good, but my chief interest is in this kernel of narrative uncertainty. 

Conventional narrative depicts a character making a decision that eliminates all previously available options. Borges presents the possibility of a world in which every option continues to exist simultaneously, each leading to unlimited future possibilities, some of which converge but for different reasons.

I've been waiting for feedback from my committee on material I gave them a month ago. As days pass, I imagine increasingly elaborate reasons for their silence. I also increasingly think of the things I should have addressed in the draft I gave them: race and slapstick, the myth of the persistence of vision, and sources that my sources referred to, and their sources, and so forth.

"The Garden of the Forking Paths" helps me think about the internal and textual problems I'm encountering. My mind attempts to contain all courses and recourses, while I struggle with the ongoing textual impossibility of tracking down all sources connected to any given bibliography. (Each source I trace contains within it its own bibliography, which I feel compelled to track down as well.)

All things stem from this philosophical dilemma. Clearly, no one can get it all. But it still makes me feel dull. 

Dear Student*

Dear Student: I'm pretty sure that the word you want is "undertow," not "under-toe." Also, when referring to a woman, one should not use the word "female" as a noun. An animal can be "a female," but a woman is not. In short, use the word "woman." Finally, when you send an email to me explaining that you're "not feeling well," don't ask me if you're going to miss "any information."

*Please note that I do not intend for the "Dear Student" posts to be read by my actual students. As such, I limit identifying details and never use a student's name or description. Furthermore, 

nearly every error or problem identified in the "Dear Student" posts comes up in my response to the student(s)'s work—albeit in a much different form. So it's not like I'm just making fun of my dumb students and not actually trying to teach them.

***I am instituting a new class policy, I've decided. Each student earns 25% of his or her grade on the basis of class participation, as described in the syllabus. Clearly, I need to describe more fully what this means. It means that I'm paying attention to who's talking and who's prepared (as measured by our new, required 10-minute in-class writing assignment). Now, you can get a possible 5 points each class period, 2 of which are predicated on the substance of your in-class writing. This more specific method of measuring student performance will, I believe, benefit me and (possibly) the students. Not to make a fine point, but I've had enough. Whee!

A hard slog

I'm still working on the piece of writing that will eventually become my dissertation introduction. It's a hard slog through the first parts: laying out the various arguments between scholars in my sub-sub-field and constructing working definitions of my terms. In other words, the theory parts. (Being a little hung-over from backyard "camping" doesn't help a lot.) It's almost over.

The rest of it should be a lot easier. Because the theory arises from the films I've been watching, conveying how the theory applies to the films is just the same thing but backwards.

I've been confident before in a piece of work, only to get it back with significant, heavy critique, but this time, I think it really will be good. Or it will be horrible. My committee will let me know either way.

At this point, though, (like so many things in life) it's just a matter of doing.

Writing and writing and writing

Gene Fowler: "Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead."

yep. 

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch: "Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings."

yep even more.

The pleasure of being anonymous

First: the eulogy of the world was written last Friday. Rest well, DFW. 

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One of the aspects of living in a small town (that I hated) is that everyone knows you. Or your dad or mom. Or your mom and dad's car. At least, they think they know you.

One of the things I loved about moving away from Arkadelphia was that I could leave that misremembered history that others associated with me. I apparently was a mud-flinger in kindergarten. Another girl (who I graduated with) bit someone once, which earned her a 15-year nickname. She might still have it—she never left.

When I left town, adults no longer said to me, "Oh, you're Dr. Murphy's daughter. I've heard about you." Which they had because my dad liked to tell "funny" stories about his daughters, in almost every situation, including his classroom. More than a couple of my teachers had been in one of his classes, and some of them had seen at least one "Murphy girl" demonstration of Piaget's developmental experiments. (It wasn't until I was in college that I realized that the psychologist Piaget was the same person as P-I-J.) I hate to say it, but it's embarrassing for someone to tell a story about how you ran out of a classroom when you were five because you were confused by a test you weren't supposed to pass anyway, and wasn't it so adorable.

Anonymity is glorious. It means you can be no one's daughter, no one's test subject, no one's cute story. It means you don't have to wave at every passing car because one in five people knows your parents or was your nursery-school teacher or some shit like that.

Anonymity on the web is a little harder to achieve. But it is still glorious. You belong to no one, not even yourself because it's not your name. It's a different name, and the difference doesn't matter because you're speaking to strangers anyway. You finally write your worst memories, your worst parts of yourself even, to the world. Who writes back. Because who doesn't like to watch a train wreck? Who never is one?

My diamond shoes are too tight

Okay. I recognize that none of you is probably going to read the post that proceeds this one. Thinking about it, though, I realized that I could use that nifty website link for a number of other questions. Like: Am I working right now?

So, yeah, I'm not, and not just because it's lunch time. When I start working again, I'll probably go until around 12-1 at night. Maybe longer if I'm on a roll. It's kind of like working a second shift. My two responsibilities (work-wise) are teaching a TTh class and working on dissertation stuff. The class lasts for an hour and fifteen minutes, and I determine how to distribute the rest of my time. It may sound great to someone bound  by routine, and it pretty much is. I won't lie. But it also means that this weekend, I'll be working (at minimum) 12-hour days, outside of grading and teaching preparation.

Which means that today is like tomorrow will be (except, I hope, I'll muster enough discipline to get started earlier). It's a weird kind of disjunction from everyone else's work week, especially when I wake up on non-class days thinking it's Sunday when really it's Wednesday. (Then I get excited because Wednesday is a great prime-time tv day.) Conversely, the only advantage to weekends is that everyone else plans to do fun things, and I can make time for those things in my work schedule.

Now I'm going to eat the last half of yesterday's sandwich (turkey, avocado, and bacon!) and watch The People's Court. A sandwich that Sam wrapped up for me because he makes sure I'm fed and have everything I need to be productive. I can't say it enough: he's wonderful, and I love him.

On a more serious note, I send my condolences to J-P and his family and wish both him and Melissa safe travels.

Imaginary writing

I do quite a bit of imaginary composition. Manifestos when I'm in traffic (or fantastic, involved, 12-minute intricacies about why I might be late). The beginnings of a story as I walk to meeting on campus. Partial sestinas when I'm in the shower. (I like to take long showers, but it's hard to remember the pattern for that form.) Movie scenarios while my students are peer reviewing each other's papers.

That kind of composition is fleeting, and I think blogging sometimes resembles it. 

Recently, I've been composing my first class of this semester. Monday is the first official day of classes, and my TTh class starts Tuesday at 8am. Freshman Composition. Maybe I'll ask them about their mental essays, poems, and songs. 

I've actually written lots of posts between now and the last one I posted. A lot is going on right now for me mentally, physically, socially, politically. I'm not sure how much of it I want to disclose, so I've discarded pages of stuff. Instead I've been doing quite a bit of imaginary writing. It's written in lemon juice, invisible. Hold it over a flame to see the muddle.