what a way to make a living...

Oh dear, what have I got myself into?

Something you need to know about be is that I can be incredibly lazy.  I know a lot of people say that about themselves when it's not true, but I seriously think I'm allergic to work, like normal people 9 to 5 kind of work.  You know that song by Dolly Parton? Yeah, that scares the hell out of me.  I'm idealistic and lazy, and that kind of work is just not for me.  This is why I want to be an academic.  My idea of "work" is when I spend three or four 12 hour research/writing days in a row, followed by a couple of weeks of "thinking time".  I do consider thinking time to be working time, coming up with ideas, mulling them over, going to class and museums and movies and reading novels and watching BBC documentaries.  All of these things are important to me when it comes to those intense days of work, but to most people it's nothing more than decadent leisure time, the kind of time people have to carefully plan for in the busy working lives.

Don't worry, I feel guilty about it.  I know I'm living the life, and essentially avoiding "real" work.  I really don't expect anyone to pay for me to live this lifestyle, and as much as I hope to someday be a famous scholar and professor at prestigious university, I really kinda don't want to work for anyone, especially a university.  Most of my like-minded friends decided to become school teachers, which I would have done if I didn't have such a problem with authority and administration.  I saw academic life as a life of freedom, but I'm not so naive these days; I know I won't be able to get through my entire life without it being taken over by work.

I really just don't like people telling me what to do.  I know what I need to do and I just need space and time to do it.  I'm a huge brat that way.

Bearing all of this in mind and adding the fact that I come from a long line of entrepreneurs (my great uncle invented the franchise system when he joined up with Colonel Sanders to start KFC, my great grandma owned a beauty salon, my grandparents owned a business building horse trailers, my mom started several business when I was growing up), plus the fact that I have a very like-minded sister with the same aversion to authority, and it almost seems inevitable that we'd try to start our own business.

And so now I'm in it, and it's just like a real job except that I'm not getting any pay (as of now).  We've built a website, written a book, and work several hours a day trying to build an online presence, and now I must write content for a blog to post every single day.  (It takes me hours just to prepare a post for this blog, and I only post about once a week.) Plus, you know, it is an editing business and we're hoping to get some clients so that I can do more work editing manuscripts.

Holy crap! What is going to happen to my museum days and matinée films and long leisurely walks through the city?  On top of school, no less.  And you know what's just around the corner?  Spring, that's what. Spring and picnics and long leisurely walks through the park, and concerts and then summer is going to be here and how can I possibly work 8 hours a day in summer??

Oh goodness, it really is time for me to grow up and join reality, isn't it?  Really though, I love Arch Editing, and I'm confident that it will work out.  I love the website and the blog and the book and I love editing, and even if I do have to work 8 hours a day, I can start those 8 hours after I go to a museum, or I can take a 2 hour lunch to walk through the park.  There is freedom in that.

papers, travel and melancholia

This week has been a good week.  The paper got done, with an hour to spare, and even though I hate it, it was accepted to be presented at the Popular Culture Association/ American Culture Association National Conference this April in San Antonio.  On Wednesday I registered for the conference and booked a nice, inexpensive hotel room in San Antonio and found some really cheap plane tickets that will take me from London to Utah, Utah to Texas and Texas back to London for only $980.  Incredible.  I also applied for funding with my school for the conference, and I should hear back about that in about 3 weeks.

So that's pretty much set to go.  I'll be leaving for Utah on March 31 and I'll be back in London just in time for the Royal Wedding and research juries.  I haven't bought the tickets yet because I am a little worried about taking that much time off before the juries, which will decide whether or not I can be upgraded from the MPhil to a PhD.  But this is where I am extremely grateful for that wedding because it sounds like the juries will have to be pushed back, hopefully more than a week.  

This week I also started classes. One is a research methods class, and I found out that I have to give a presentation on my somewhat non-existent research on February 8th.  My other class is about melancholy, how it shows up and what it means in culture.  We had a somewhat interesting discussion on this etching by Albrect Durer called "Melancholia I" (no one has ever found "Melancholia II" or "Melancholia III", but it's supposed that this might have been part of a series originally)

The image is of a very heavy, weighed down angel, solemnly musing with a darkened face and curious bits lying around it.  Apparently some German art historians spent decades trying to figure out what it all means. I think the satisfying conclusion is basically that melancholy is not a useless state of being, but a noble state, especially for the scholar and philosopher.  It's a balanced paradoxical state, as evidenced by many of the images in the etching:  the angel with wings who is too heavy to fly, the unringing bell, the hourglass with equal amounts of sand in each half (time that has stopped), the starved dog at rest (the dog was often a symbol of lust, apparently, which was also associated with melancholy, and yet here he is docile and conquered).  It is an image of paradoxical movement and stasis, and I guess that's what melancholy is.  I don't know, that's basically what I got out of the hour long lecture.  I'm excited for next week because we'll be talking about the Gothic, which is kind of my thing. 

I'm really struggling right now with my own research.  The idea I had originally is not proving very fruitful, and I keep discovering book that have done all the things I thought to do.  I'm stuck and I'm falling into that overwhelmed state where I'd rather sit and stare at a wall than spend a day reading a book that might end up being useless to me.  I'm scared of wasting time when I'm doing the research, so I'd rather do nothing.  Plus I might not be as interested in the topic as I thought I was.  I'd rather be doing anything than reading WWI history.  It might be time for a refocus, but it might also be too late for one. 

On a final note, Stephen Fry has been making a documentary and tweeting his locations, which for the last week have been in my neighborhood. Alas, all of my attempts to find him, including a sprint to the British Museum this morning, have been fruitless.  Maybe I'll get lucky this week.  I've been listening to his The Ode Less Traveled, a book about writing poetry.  He has exercises in the book that have been very challenging and fun, and I'm hoping it will help me think more creatively.

won't you please please help me?

Today is officially the last day of winter break. Although it never really felt like the end of a semester around here because it really wasn't. Right now the libraries are packed full of kids studying for their finals, because finals come after winter break. I have been staring at my computer all week trying to write a paper due on Tuesday. So that wonderful feeling of everything being done and being able to relax over the break never really happened for most of us.

I'm glad life is starting back up anyway. Next week will be busy and wonderful. I'll have turned this horrid paper in, classes and new projects will begin. Then it will feel like a new year.

Oh this paper. It really is killing me. I feel that it is rife with problems, that it is convoluted and uncertain of itself and I'm being stubborn and refuse to scrap it and start over. If I've learned anything from all the massive amounts of television I consume, starting over never worked in Project Runway, not this late in the game, and I have Tim Gunn in my head right now telling me to "make it work". I'm 1/4 way through my word count and I have 4 more days before it's due, so I think that's plenty of time to make it work.

One of the main problems is that I'm kind of not so much in to the topic as I thought I was at first. I tend to go with my gut on topics, and if something catches my interest and I think about it more than twice then that's what I go for. Typically that involves something with horror or gothic stories and movies, and that's what happened this time. We were talking about science in the nineteenth centuries and I kept thinking about Poe and his interest in science, and about Mary Shelley and H.P. Lovecraft and it just seemed to me that so much of the horror genre was born out of this anxiety with science that existed in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, and I wanted to explore how and why these authors used science as a theme in their horror novels.

I think one of my biggest problems is terminology. Even though they are so obviously connected it's hard to bring these three people into one 4000 word paper, mostly because of annoying differences in labels. I hate to have to categorize them all. Is Shelley a Romantic or a Gothic? Is Poe a Gothic? I don't think so, but everyone says he is. Lovecraft surely isn't Gothic, but he kind of is? Some people say they all wrote science fiction, while technically science fiction isn't supposed to be a genre until the 1920s. They certainly didn't write horror stories, right? Even though they are the predecessors to modern horror. They all come from very different social backgrounds and all have very different experiences with science, whatever category someone puts them in. I guess labels don't matter in the end. What matters is how I connect them and what conclusions I can draw from the connection. The connection I've chosen is the poles, meaning the arctic and antarctic poles. They all have moments of discovery in the poles. That's the key point I think.

I hope it comes together and I can make it work. Part of me really doesn't like the fact that my life consists of me agonizing about a paper, but at the same time nothing is more satisfying than finishing a paper and feeling proud of the work I've done. I'm going to try to keep doing this, and maybe, just maybe, someone someday will pay me for it.

If they don't pay me to write papers, maybe they'll pay me to read them. My sister started an editing boutique recently and I've joined up. We're a two lady operation now and hoping beyond hope that we can get some fishies to bite. The thing is, I've been reading/editing/grading papers now for the last 7 years. I started grading papers before I even knew how to write papers. And after all of these years of writing/reading/editing/grading papers I think I've finally grasped the elusive beauty of the academic essay. I don't mean to boast, but it's basically the ONLY thing I am good at.

What we're doing is offering a whole range of editing options, from Global and Substantive Edits (content and rhetoric) to Copy Edits (grammar and punctuation) to Proofreading (cleaning up typos and making the format pretty). Anything any student or writer could need. And we both have years of experience and we are both really really smart people.

So, I'm asking all of my 3 readers to help me get the word out about our editing boutique. It's called Arch Editing, and you can find us on Twitter and Facebook under that name, and here is the lovely link to our lovely website: http://archediting.wordpress.com/

busy busy

I'm trying really hard to keep my life as busy as possible. The busier I am, the better I can maintain a decent sleeping schedule, the more I can get done and the less time I have to sit around and be dramatic. So, when my department secretary called me this week and asked if I could take on another teaching assistantship I didn't hesitate for a second. I'll be TAing Humanities 202, getting an extra 1o hours a week. That's double what I was making last week, so I'm very pleased. I can't wait to see my next paycheck.

Taking on another class, 50 more students, and two more teaching hours on Friday will be kind of crazy, especially since I am defending my thesis this semester and applying to PhD programs, and taking a Comparative Literature class that has a heavy load of reading. Fridays will be the most interesting days. I have class at 8:00, then I teach 202 at 10:00, 101 at 11:00 and 12:00 and another 202 at 1:00. That's 4 hours of teaching in row. I'm going to be exhausted. At least I'll be done with the day by 2:00 and feel accomplished.

Tomorrow will be class prep day, but I also need to figure out what the heck is going on with my thesis. If I have to defend in early March that means I need to get a copy of my draft to my readers as soon as possible.

Oh, I've also finally opened up an etsy shop. It's still coming together, but today I took photos of items and posted two of them. I've been anxious about this, and getting it going was a big accomplishment for me. I have lots of stuff I'd like to sell and I'm tired of just talking about it. I also just organized most of my yarn and found a lot of great stuff I can use to make more items, and I have some good ideas. Before I get a new project started I need to finish off a few more things and get all the finished items up on etsy. That should be a good weekend project.