I've always liked to write, and producing copious amounts of text has never been a problem for me . . . until I moved here. Now that someone is telling me I have to write, I finally understand what the phrase squeezing blood out of a turnip means. (I am also coming to understand that turnips are entirely way too stubborn for their own good!)
Nonetheless, I still entertain thoughts about how school must have made Einstein feel, along with ideas about all the things I might write if someone weren't insisting that I do so. I derive a secret pleasure from generating potential titles and acknowledgments pages--both layered with lots of barely disguised meaning. I've forgotten the more "scholarly" ones because I haven't bothered to write them down, but here are a few whimsical ones that amused me:
ABD is Good Enough for Me!: Why Our Best & Brightest Are Checking Out Instead of Trading Up
ABD - All But Dissertation or All But Dead?: How Grad Schools Are Smothering Innovation & Killing Creativity
From Pollyanna to Puddleglum: Case Studies of Depression, Dementia, & Distractability in Doctoral Candidates
Bitter? Who me? Naaaah!
Bombarded by a steady stream of data, demands, and decisions, she felt fragmented—uncertain of herself and even less certain of her place in the current universe. She wished that a pause button would induce a state of suspended animation, creating a conceptual place outside the fabric of space-time where she could recompose herself. In that space she would collect and consider pieces of herself. She would sift, sort, synthesize, reshape, and revise her thoughts, her life, and herself there.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Hot Off the Presses (Well, at Least the Presses of My Mind!)
Labels:
control,
depression,
distraction,
food,
graduate school,
scholarship,
turnips,
writing
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