Exciting Thesis Update!

[trouble]

Okay, so, despite my brain doing its normal "you are a failure who will never do anything with your life you stupid person you" thing, I actually managed to write a good 1300 words today, and by that I mean an actual good 1300 words today as opposed to my usual dreck. I think this latest draft will actually be the one that goes someplace other than dead fish land. I'm very happy about that. I've also added a bunch of notes at the end so I remember what I wanted to add in at that point, which is great. It's nice to end because I know what I want to say rather than because I am just sitting there in helpless sadness.

Don made me the emergency pie we keep in our freezer for bad brain days, so soon I will be happily consuming that and making him listen as I regale him with my infinite graphing genius. (Here is my first graph, which is merely tracing the increase in enrollment at my school from when they started till when free education was offered. Exciting stuff I know, but I love it like ice cream, seriously. Like, if I had time and energy I'd want to talk about the enrollment of boys vs girls and how the school really pushed how it was creating good little workers out of the boys and didn't talk much about the girls until much later, when suddenly enrollment of girls jumps drastically over two years. I am so boring and i am so happy at the same time. I love my discipline so much.)

Anyway, tomorrow I will be in the archives because I never noted the amount of donations/grants the school was receiving and now I need that info to make my point, and I put that in bold so later I don't go "What was I going to do today?" and then feel silly. Yes, I write notes to myself in the middle of my journal because I am really really punchy right now.

Seriously, though, my argument is really coming together now and I'm so pleased, even though the argument currently is really really low on the word count. I haven't written a draft of this chapter yet that's gotten past 1500 words, but this one... I think it's going to go there because I'm really focusing on the argument and less on the recitation of facts and it's so purty and this is why I shouldn't drink so much caffeine right before updating my journal, sorry.

I also emailed back and forth a bit more today with potential thesis advisers, paid off enough of my tuition fees that I could register for next semester (I originally was planning on having blown this pop stand by now but that's patently not happening), and panicked a bit over PhD apps, so all in a normal week at Chez Anna, I guess.


There's a ghost in this picture, can you find it?

Comments

[emee]

Yay graph!! I love graphs. :)

[trouble]

Isn't it exciting? My next one will be showing grants & funding!

WHY ARE YOU UP?

[emee]

Because sleep is for the weak! :)

[challyzatb]

See? I told you it was good. :)

[ginny_t]

Hooray for progress! ^_^

I think I need emergency pie in my freezer. I need to find the kind that comes with a cabana boy to cook it, too.

[umadoshi]

I was also pleased by this notion of "emergency pie". What a good idea!

[silveradept]

Sounds like progress to me! And once you've gotten it writ, if you have time, have someone crit it and point out where you can be clearer or more engaged in your argument. You'll find that word count goes up, either a little or a lot, when you have other people look at it and make sure they can follow the lines and there aren't gaps in the reasoning.