I don’t really like that. I have always tried to avoid doing it, even though it is really common and hard to avoid sometimes. I just feel like the words “I love you” are more important than they sound during a rushed goodbye. What if it’s the last thing you ever say to that person?

If I’m going to tell someone I love them, I want to mean those words, not bunch them all together and then hang up the phone. I’m not saying I never express my affection absently, but it is something I try not to do.

Building a more professional image is why I moved from my old space on Blogger to this new fancy website I created, so intentionally tarnishing it would be folly, right?

If I do get to the place where I write a dissertation, I want to do it on something I want to do it on. Does that sound stupid? I had started going down the path that the market wanted me to go down, and maybe that’s why I have faltered. That and maybe I get distracted and bored too easily. I want to do something that is interview based, that draws on my work in sociology and folklore. I want to interview women about marriage. I was reading an article the other day that discussed the plight of American singles and it mentioned this 2009 study that examined single women’s perceptions of their social environment. I want to do something like that. I can feel myself being excited at doing something like that, at bringing stories that make people reflect on themselves and on the way things are to life in non-textual ways. I think the field of composition’s quest for social justice can be a bit too much for me. I never really wanted to save the world. I always just wanted to tell interesting stories. Someplace in my conversion narrative, I started adopting the crusading desire to uncover systemic hegemony. I am still interested in that, but it’s not the only thing I am interested in.

I am also interested in health, cooking, being outdoors, having a family. I am less interested in writing articles than I am in teaching. I am less interested in teaching than I am in being the boss, of coordinating things, of administrating. These are some of the things I was trying to find out in the Conscious Career Course I blogged about over the summer, which actually didn’t exactly work out for me for a variety of reasons but which did give me some ideas regarding how to go about parlaying my strengths and interests into a rewarding career.

Many people would like to see me finish the PhD, myself included. If I don’t though, I am versatile and adaptable. I am down to earth and realistic. Even though some may disagree, I am pragmatic and sensible. I’m smart, patient, detail-oriented, and tech savvy. I could do any job. After looking at the tens of thousands in student loan debt and hundreds of thousands of words I’ve accumulated towards the pursuit of a doctorate, many will say it is incredibly irresponsible to abandon it. Perhaps they are right. But what takes more courage?

To hang on to the ship as it submerges, hoping that you can float to land before drowning? Or to wrench off a chunk of the vessel that can serve as an impromptu raft, salvage a paddling implement, and start rowing?

Not rowing just yet, and still not sure the ship is really sinking. But keeping a weather eye on the horizon? You bet. Until that storm hits, though, I have an exam reading schedule to get back to.

Come to think of it, I have hardly touched my office, which is what I am supposed to be doing today.

I’ve been travelling a lot this summer, nothing so exciting as visiting the ocean or the mountains, but exciting enough in that my travels have afforded me the opportunity to spend a good deal of quality time with my loved ones and have also exposed me to places along that in-between stretch of I-90 that I otherwise would have never seen. Evangola State Park, for example, which is just about halfway between Cleveland and Syracuse and which provided me one of the loveliest camping and beach experiences I’ve ever had. Hamburg, NY, and the surrounding area – quaint and peaceful, great restaurants, and again, conveniently halfway between my NY home and my OH home. 

One thing that has always struck me while driving on the highway is the dark tracks left by other cars. Sometimes they skid off the road, disappearing into the grassy median. Sometimes they just stay in the lane, one long track followed by staccato stutters; neither inscription providing any clues about how they came to be or what occurred in their aftermath.

I look at the jersey barriers a lot: there are often marks where cars have evidently bumped or skidded into them and skittered along, leaving their signature on the concrete. There are many construction areas along this corridor, so jersey barriers line great stretches of highway along my 6 hour journey and I usually drive next to these walls with white knuckles, carefully and attentively reading the available distance between myself and the cars to my right as I pass. Sometimes, I lack the chutzpah to drive in the passing lane and keep it at an even 60mph behind an SUV to avoid the anxiousness of speeding past other cars next to an unforgiving concrete barrier.

Because people run into them. I have never run into one (knocking on wood here) and I have never seen anyone run into one, but they do – the evidence is left by their cars. And what marks do the walls make on the cars that bump into them? When I am driving, I have to be careful not to spend too long looking at these marks, wondering who made them and what happened as a result. If I let it go too far, I begin getting very nervous and uneasy – not very helpful when you’re passing two semis with a tailgating Nissan on your ass. I begin imagining the circumstances behind all those dark marks, and thinking about the people in the cars that left them there. The marks on the jersey barriers, and the tire marks on the highway too. I always puzzle over how they got there and whether the person driving the vehicle that deposited them on the pavement escaped cleanly or perished. Pretty morbid thinking for a nice highway drive, but not really when you consider that in the US, 115 people die per day in car accidents – that’s one every 13 minutes. Some of those marks are whispers of their stories, and some are traces of close calls that maybe ended with the driver crossing herself and drawing deep breaths to slow her hammering heart. Either way, they stand for me as a sober warning to be ever vigilant while navigating the road, and a reminder to be grateful for the life in my limbs, for it is fragile, and can be obliterated in an instant. 

This kind of straightforward consideration of what exactly I will gain from completing my degree will most likely be looked upon by my superiors and even my peers as an unwise admission of my instability at this point in my career, but this is such a large issue in my life right now, and one of the underpinning principles of my field is that writing promotes thinking and understanding. Hopefully I can help this come to fruition. Another guiding principle, though, is that a writer should know her audience. Since anyone can access this blog and I don’t really know who may be reading, I feel like sometimes the writing here takes an antiseptic quality, sanitized of all real worry or doubt and concerned mostly with putting my best foot forward for when I go on the market, an endeavor made so formidable by everyone who has gone before that anything which may put my reputation in jeopardy is regarded with suspicious paranoia and is generally quickly cleaned up or hidden.

I have been trying to read for my exams now for about 8 months. I have read so little that I almost can’t believe it. I feel so overwhelmed by the process that any intellectual progress (or any progress at all) has ground to a complete halt. Putting that down into words is difficult and embarrassing. The monster of doubt is asking me if I really want to publish these sentences or if I should discard this draft and make an appointment with a therapist instead. But I know I am not the only one. I know that these feelings are pervasive and that they have the power to cripple bright, promising people under the weight of prohibitive tradition, and perhaps one of those reasons is because so few of us feel at liberty to disclose just how trapped and confused we feel.

The schedule and pace of academia doesn’t work for me. I feel so absurd saying that, since what we have are big, open spaces to design and accomplish big, complicated tasks. Saying it doesn’t work for me feels like an admission that I am poor at managing my own time. But yet, this seems to be the truth. I do well with a busy, structured schedule. I’ve never been very good at creating such a structure on my own. I feel like a failure, a product of a hegemonic system which can’t function well outside the parameters that I have been brought up to value. But I can’t deny what has been happening to me: as I move further along in higher education, I have become worse, not better, at managing and meeting deadlines. I have experienced disappointments that I would have never allowed to happen in my younger years, when I seemed to be able to successfully juggle many more tasks and work a full time job to boot.

I’ve been talking about quitting since the second year of my master’s program. I have put this decision aside countless times as I struggle with what it is I really want out of this pursuit. I’ve created deadlines by which I said I’d assess the situation more, and those deadlines have passed (like so many others). The inertia is killing me. I want to take my exams, but mostly because I am supposed to take them, because it is the next step in the process. I’ve been elected the Secretary of the GSO for the next academic year, so I feel compelled to stay for that experience, but I need to ask myself whether I can do this for another 12 months of my life. The answer is always, “You Have To.” All of the constraints I’ve set up mandate that it must be so. But is this what I really want?

I have enrolled in a six week Conscious Career Course to help me explore my options and to talk with other people who find themselves in a similar situation. I am hoping that this will have a positive impact on my outlook and will empower me develop a plan should I ever go through with pulling the plug on grad school and turn my attentions elsewhere. The first meeting is June 12th. It’s possible that the course, which also claims to help put academic pursuits into perspective, might even inspire me to get my ass moving on my exam reading. I do think completing the PhD would be a success. I am just not sure whether it will be essential to the career I ultimately choose, which makes me question whether all of the suffering is worth it.

Even admitting that this experience contains a healthy dose of suffering is another one of those sentiments that seems to beg for a swab of antiseptic, to be doused with a solution that will stop the growth of the negative bacteria that threatens to devour what I’ve worked so hard to achieve so far. But I’m going to let it fester here on the page, going to admit that big parts of me are suffering because of the path I have chosen. Eventually I’ll have to move out of this position; let’s see if I can maybe write my way out. I plan to use this space to document my progress through the course. Might as well, since it hasn’t been being used for much else lately. Ergo, tally ho. Let’s see if I can get to healing these wounds.

More radical feminist thinkers would probably be disappointed in this post, perhaps seeing my speculated aversion to disruptive discourse as succumbing to the hegemonic pressure of our patriarchally founded and governed systems. Maybe this is some of that. Others, particularly feminists of color and researchers who study women of racial minorities (Hossfeld, 1990) interpret an unwillingness to disrupt prescribed behavior guidelines as a rhetorical strategy; a survival tactic one cultivates based on information from her surroundings and deploys in order to maximize her benefits in a given situation. This type of rhetorical resistance may seem, to some, a weak and manipulative way to navigate one’s circumstances. But understanding the expectations of an audience is one of the principle foundations of rhetoric. Using what one knows about the assumptions and values of one’s receivers enables rhetors to evaluate and deliver the most effective kinds of communication. Plus, like B Coop’s character says in Limitless, we’re creatures of survival. We are hardwired to want to make it, and this drive perpetuates a whole host of tactics to ensure that we do so. Using all of the available means at their disposal, rhetors of all stripes finally strive to “make it,” to guide the opinions of their receivers down a path that they deem favorable, or just, or necessary. This ensures that they, and their interests, may endure and possibly thrive.

Even in view of that perspective, though, I still feel somewhat guilty about modifying or even thinking about modifying my behavior in a way that seems to endorse hegemonic discourse conventions. I mean, I like using emoticons. I have always been pretty heavy on the smileys, and I even send winks and kisses with considerable frequency. To me, and evidently to many other women (and men, though as has been determined, less), emoticons help convey more meaning in electronic interfaces than text alone. Perhaps this discussion is emblematic of my recent awareness that I seem to be in a process of identity expansion and solidification; in the last few weeks I’ve compiled a Teaching Portfolio, revised my Teaching Philosophy, declared my candidacy for Secretary of the GSO (vote for me!), and collaborated on a proposal to the GSO for the approval of a pilot program in public relations and web maintenance. I also have been nesting into the web big time, as you might have noticed with the additions to the front page of this site and the increase in navigation bar options. My recent resurgence on Twitter has me feeling more connected to the intellects of good people doing fantastic stuff, providing a buoy in the expansive and solitary ocean of exam reading. Worthy though they are of examination in their own right, these are topics for another post. In the meantime, I’d be interested to know what other people (namely, you) think about the issues I’ve raised here. How often do you use emoticons? In what contexts? And have you ever experienced cultural dissonance as a result of an emoticon exchange or lack thereof? I think these questions would be pretty interesting to investigate and would welcome any opinions you might like to contribute.