Tag Archives: thesis

Why I’m desperate for a grown up job.

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I have been working exclusively from home since the end of 2011.

“That’s awesome,” I hear you all say. “You’re so lucky! The freedom! The flexibility! The pyjamas!“

Not so, internet friends.

It is officially unhealthy for me to live, study, and work at home. At first, of course, I loved it. If I’m honest, for the first year I loved it.

Lately, though, I’ve been feeling a pull back to the Real World – a world in which I have to wake up at a particular time and get dressed into something other than a clean pair of PJ pants, in which I can’t schedule lunches with friends that turn into ridiculous five-hour-long drinking sessions (to be fair, though, I haven’t done that in many years), in which I have to uphold a certain level of acceptable appearance.

Basically, internet, I feeling uuuuugly.

I’m not one to give too much of a shit about the way that I look. I’m not precious about anything, really. I’ve had exactly two manicures in my life, and they were both in Bali last month. I’ve had my hair dyed in a salon once, and I haven’t dyed it at all this year, despite the increasing wash of greys at my temple. (And I wonder why I think I look old…)

My eyebrows are six-months unplucked (although, thankfully, ten years of over-plucking mean that I’m not growing a sexy monobrow… yet), I haven’t had a shower yet today and it’s 4pm (true story), and I’m wearing an outfit that could really only be described as stay-at-home-mum chic… Except I’m not running around after toddlers all day. I’m not running around after anything, in fact, and that’s why I’ve managed to acquire myself a casual 10 extra kilos this year.

Another true story.

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don’t worry. this makes me just as embarrassed as it makes you.

The thing is, it’s not a matter of me being lazy or anything. I’m not lazy. I have most of a PhD written, and multiple jobs. It’s just that none of these things require me to leave my house, and I am going bonkers. It’s taking every fibre of my being to stop myself from spending my days lurking job boards looking for the job of my dreams*.

*Note that ‘job of my dreams’ doesn’t actually involve having a conventional job at all. If it were possible I’d just make traveling and writing my profession, but not yet, young ones. Not yet.

It all returns to that stinking, rotten ol’ chestnut of my thesis, though, doesn’t it? Once that’s done I can Do Other Things in the Real World with Actual People (caps necessary).

And perhaps then I’ll be motivated to do other things, too. Like fix up my hair, and shower before midday, and spend time being active with other human beings, and wear something without an elasticated waist. Maybe.

(Who even am I?)

Turklism.

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…on the networked computers of our everyday lives, people have compelling interactions that are entirely dependent upon their online self-representations. In cyberspace, hundreds of thousands, perhaps already millions, of users create online personae who live in a diverse group of virtual communities where the routine formation of multiple identities undermines any notion of a real and unitary self. Yet the notion of the real fights back. People who live parallel lives on the screen are nevertheless bound by the desires, pain, and mortality of their physical selves. Virtual communities offer a dramatic new context in which to think about human identity in the age of the Internet. They are spaces for learning about the lived meaning of a culture of simulation. Will it be a separate world where people get lost in the surfaces or will we learn how to see how the real and the virtual can be made permeable, each having the potential for enriching and expanding the other?

Sherry Turkle* was a big deal in Internet research in the 90s, and said some fairly sensible things alongside some pretty crazy things — but it wasn’t unusual for theory to be a bit crazy, back then.

The fear mongering over online communication is nothing now compared to what it was a decade or more ago. There was this real, pervasive sense of “the virtual” taking over online, with no room left for “the real”.

No one considered that virtual and real could be the same thing — or that virtual didn’t really exist (but rather that online was simply an extension of offline).

I’m battling with a very theory-heavy chapter at the moment, and whilst it’s inching its way towards finished, a handful of words at a time, I feel like I’m not making much headway, and hence blogging has been the last thing on my mind. Occasionally I (re)read passages like the above, though, and have to share them.

Most of the time, though, I just find myself becoming more and more confused by my own work, and that can’t be a good thing.

Sherry Turkle (1995) Life on the screen New York: Simon & Schuster

Three things.

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20130205_155903

one. chapter structure changed, yet again. sigh. no titles for chapters yet. (you’ll notice at the bottom there’s one called instaflickrbook. don’t think i can really use that, sadly.)

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two. one of the few moments in the day that i’m not touching it. (gross.)

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three. desk and head from above. this is the level my boredom has reached.

no time to think serious-like. this week my thesis has given birth to a new (but necessary) chapter, so there is some major restructuring going on, and i can’t stop daydreaming about life post-thesis – a pretty common reaction when i start getting stressed. focus!

Mental health weekend

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Even though I am busier than… I don’t know, what’s busy? An ant building a nest? Department stores at Christmas time?

I can’t think of a good analogy. Even though I am busier than the busiest thing you can imagine, I took the weekend off from study and work and the Internet just to give my brain a break. It was pretty good! I feel like I’ve wasted too much time though… but two nights in a row I only managed 2.5 hours sleep so I think it was a break that was deserved, and needed.

I drank craft beer and wore flowers in my hair. It was grand.

Back to the real world today, though. This week demands of me editing en masse, conference abstract submissions, an application for an internship that I really, really, really want to go to, and staying up to try get a ticket to Coachella. And work. I work for a medical practice when I’m not teaching, and over the Christmas/New Year break I barely had any work as the doctors were on leave. They’ve all come back though, so work has ramped up at exactly the same time as Shit Got Real with my thesis. But, in my spare time I moonlight as Wonder Woman, so I can do it all, y’know?

Speaking of Shit Getting Real, I’m going to Europe for a bunch of conferences in just over 60 days. Holy what. And in that time, I’ve got quite a few things on – down south for a couple of days, Perth Writers’ Festival which goes for four days, my best friend’s PhD graduation and celebration party, tickets to 4 gigs, a conference paper to write, so many chapters to complete… and I was hoping to go to Melbourne for a couple of days to see The Frames, but I can see that that’s just not going to happen.

Ah well. This is what I’ve been working towards, right? Who needs sleep in time like these!

It’ll all be worth it. Draft by March 29, Dad’s 60th birthday on March 30th, then off to Europe (and maybe America) on April 7th.

Light : tunnel

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chapterstructure

Today, for the first time ever, my thesis has a structure that will not alter.

For the first time ever, I have eight chapter folders all containing substantial amounts of writing (around 75,000 words in total, with three chapters unfinished).

After a week or so of feeling like I had an insurmountable task ahead of me, my head is back in the game, and by this time next week I will be able to hold in my hands eight fully written chapters, printed and ready for editing.

Then I will need to write the introduction and conclusion.

Then, after supervisor review and final edits, it will be done. One day.

There is still so much work to do, but there’s no denying that soon, my world will be vastly different.

Sometimes I feel like all I ever do is bang on about my thesis, but it’s just consumed so much of my time over the past six months. In that short amount of time, it’s been completely turned around form a project that was dead in the water to a project that I am going to see through to conclusion. It feels pretty good to be this close to the end.

The curious case of GOMI: The dark side of having an audience.

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The web is seriously creeping me out today.

Or, more accurately, I should say that the people on the web are creeping me out. For the first time in the more-than-a-decade that I have been blogging, I suddenly feel quite uncomfortable with the idea that people, for no good reason other than to express themselves, share the minutiae of their lives online for the entertainment of strangers.

Perhaps it’s because I spent far too long today trawling the forums of the Internet’s bitchiest hate site, Get Off My Internets!, taking screen shots of conversations that I will reference in my thesis… and then doing some very internet-stalkerish back-trawling of the blog posts that were the subject of those conversations, relying upon the fact that many of the blogs they referred to were blogs I knew so well that all I had to do was look in the archives at a particular month, and (generally) locate the post in question without too much trouble. All in all, I feel a little bit dirty.

GOMI isn’t a particularly nice site, but it’s a free Internet, right? We’re all entitled to our opinions. Perhaps why I feel so strange about it is because the users express many of the opinions I’ve had, but kept to myself. An unfortunate side effect of researching blogging for the past four years is that there are blogs and bloggers that I am sick to death of, but keep reading because I have to for my research.

I still feel like bloggers are real people, and should therefore be exempt from the dissection and character assassination that celebrities are subject to. At the same time, the moment that you choose to put your life online, you essentially have to accept the fact that you will be criticised, for everything from your poor grammar, to the fact that one of your eyes crinkles a bit when you smile, to the fact that your baby is a bit too chubby to be cute – and he has a weird name, anyway. And that’s not to mention picking apart the financial situation of those bloggers who are able to work from home, or (good heavens!) not work at all. (These are all examples of real posts that I read today, and are far from the most vitriolic.)

I’ve been blogging in some form since before I even knew it was called blogging. I blogged at LiveJournal (remember that??) from 1999-2002 before starting my previous blog, and this is what i think: (atiwit:), in 2004. I stopped posting to atiwit: at the start of this year during another crisis of confidence in which I suddenly began to feel a bit too exposed.

Neither of my blogs ever drew particularly big audiences. At best, atiwit: had up to around 500 visitors per day, and the only thing I ever saw written about it on a site (other than blogs written by friends) was when someone referred to my smoke detector battery removal method on a forum. Perhaps there were other things, but I never saw them, so as far as I am concerned, they don’t exist. (Yes, I vanity Google, but the forum post was actually discovered via link trackback.)

I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with the idea of online celebrity. Being Big on the Internet always seemed a bit too… invasive, I guess, and after reading GOMI today I’m pretty sure that I’ll never be striving to do anything exceptional with my blogging (not that I need to work on that – now that I’ve converted to research blogger, I’m getting 1/10th the visitors that I used to).

Get Off My Internets is such a peculiar site, and more than a little disturbing – but then again I’ve always subscribed to the policy of ‘Don’t like it? Turn it off!’. I will turn off the radio in my car if I don’t like a song. I will skip an episode of a TV show that I don’t like if I’m re-watching the series for the fiftieth time. I won’t read blogs that shit me to tears unless I absolutely have to – and I certainly won’t post about how much I hate it on the Internet.

I’m writing a chapter at the moment about identities and audiences, and I’ve included a case study of one particular blogger (who I won’t name here, as I don’t particularly enjoy her blog anymore, but I don’t think she needs extra negative attention) who received an immense amount of backlash from her readers when she changed the genre of her blog. She’s a perfect case study in how identity and authorship are really discordant concepts online. The audience of a blog has much more of a say in identity and authorship than they ever would “in real life”, and yet they’re only privy to part of the story – the identity that the blogger chooses to display. Bloggers essentially separate that part of themselves that is the blog-subject when they publish online, particularly when they become ‘successful’ bloggers. Audiences (or, in the case of face-to-face interactions, those that we engage with) always have a say in the person that we feel ourselves to be, but it’s never more visible than it is online.

I can’t help but feel that the reason so many people on GOMI are determining that bloggers are complete ‘flakes’ and nutjobs is because we, the audience, are causing them to be so.

Proceed with caution.

Late night study tunes: edn. VII

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Tonight’s soundtrack comes courtesy of Tame Impala’s recent album release, Lonerism.

lonerism

Unlike (what seems like) most people, I didn’t love their first album, Inner Speaker… but then again I didn’t actually listen to it extensively, so I will probably go back and revisit it.

I’m enjoying it. My brain really didn’t want to kick into study mode tonight after the weekend, which will be my last weekend off until after my thesis is handed in. It was a doozy, and I’m in pain, but it was worth it because now it’s all work, all the time.

Speaking of which, tonight, for the first time in quite some time, I’m feeling very anxious that I won’t be able to get this project done… but it’s almost certainly related to the fact that I have just begun editing the first half of my thesis and am thinking to myself, what the hell was I thinking? Reading back on one’s own work from the past four years is, unfortunately, a cringe-worthy experience.

The deadline edition.

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Currently, I am living, breathing, and sleeping thesis.

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It’s become my world. It’s the only thing that I really think about, outside of doing sufficient (but significantly less than I am used to – I have permission for this!) work at my job to earn some money, and remembering to wash occasionally.

There’s a good reason, though. Just before I went to Melbourne in mid-November, my supervisor set me a deadline: my entire thesis, other than the introduction and conclusion, has to be finished by the end of this year. December 31st, 2012. d day. As opposed to D Day, which will come in mid-February, and will require that everything be written, edited, referenced, and finished.

Or PhinisheD, I believe.

The reality of this situation has hit me like a ton of bricks this morning. Today is December 5. There are 26 days left in this year, but I’ve only got 21 working days left.

This afternoon and tomorrow are dedicated to completely finishing my marking (-2 days).

This weekend, I’m taking some time off to go to a close friend’s birthday, and spend the only time with friends that I will really have until next year as I’ve decided not to do anything for New Year’s Eve, as my friends are planning on going to a three-day-long festival down south, and I can’t afford the time – or the money (-2 days).

I’ll take Christmas Day off (-1 day).

That’s 21 days. Three weeks. I’ll need to do things like finish my Christmas shopping and celebrate my sister’s birthday on the 18th and do my paltry 15 hours a week of paid work, and I suppose I’ll have to sleep, which means that really, there are very few working hours left for me in this year. I feel like this should be stressing me out much more than it is. Occasionally I let myself slip into thinking that it’s simply not possible; there’s no way I will finish my thesis in the next three weeks.

But then, why not? I’ve done the work. I’ve written and read hundreds of thousands (millions!) of words over the past four years. My note taking system is so chaotic that it’s really very close to nonexistent, but I’ve got a good memory for details and can easily recognise links between concepts now, and identify areas of my work that require more attention.

I feel like a broken record, as all I ever talk about right now is my research. I never really intended for this blog to be a research blog, but I feel like it might become that. A change has happened in the past couple of weeks. I actually want to put all this hard work to use. I haven’t been the most proactive student in terms of writing for publication and attending conferences, so I know I have a lot of ground to make up, but I hope that 2013 can be my year for doing that. I hope there will be sessional teaching work and the opportunity to publish and present my research findings. I’ve decided that I actually do really want a place in this academic life, and to do it really well. This hasn’t been an easy journey – far from it – but I really do feel like it’s going to be incredibly rewarding, and this is just the beginning.

3 weeks.