(It... is Saturday in Canada, right?)

Attention thesis writers: When someone says "Your chapter will come together when you have a theory to frame it around", they are not kidding.

Oh, Chapter 2, you are the best chapter ever.

Also, semi-colons are defeating me. (No, please, don't explain. If I fret too much about it in drafting mode rather than polishing mode it becomes the bestest procrastination technique ever.)

Anyway, I have taken my original shitty draft 1 of Chapter 2, divided it up a bit better (and thus put a bunch of useless paragraphs into what will be Chapter 3), added an actual introduction that says what it's doing, rewritten a little bit of it, and although it is still a shitty draft, it is a much better shitty draft that I need to rework instead of throw out entirely. My brain is a bit tired so I'm going to be finishing up soon, but overall I am satisfied. There are more words. They are not all shite. I think the intro is good. If I smooth out this section and add in all the details I have noted to add in, this could be an excellent roughly 3/4s of Chapter 2. (I'm aiming for 5000 words, it's currently at 1,400 words, which is nothing close to 3/4s, but fixing the stuff up will add more words.)

I'm really pleased with this. I feel like I have something solid to build on now, rather than some crappy words thrown together in the hopes that they'll turn into something. I have some things I need to research (like when the VG opened. When did the VG open? "The Victoria General Hospital was established in 1887 by the City of Halifax and the provincial government when the former City and Provincial Hospital at Rockhead, on the Northwest Arm was renamed; the City and Provincial Hospital having been established in 1859.") (No, wait, "The City and Provincial Hospital opened in May 1867 and made possible the establishment of the Halifax Medical College") (Obviously the internet is not going to be helpful. Lucky I have "Century of Care" at home, which is an academic tome and thus Totally Reliable Really.)

Picture of the Victoria General Hospital in 1910)

Working party with Ysa was good! Not excellent (I apparently needed to vent about something, which I did. For an hour.), but good enough for ice cream.

Sadly, thesis editing means I'm at -300 words from my starting point this morning.

*siiiiiiiigh*

So I'm pretty much at the point of complete and utter dysfunction regarding my sleep schedule, my eating habits, my internet time-wasters, and my thesis, but hey! I called my mother and we had a good chat, and then my father wrote the NDP a sternly worded email about web accessibility that he cc:ed to me and I almost fell out of my chair. So while the rest of my life is falling apart, the family thing is going well.

(I may actually see my brother sometime this calendar year too, which will be the first time since 2003. Or maybe before. Please remember that I forgot to tell my parents I was moving to China until about a week beforehand because it slipped my mind to tell them. My family & I haven't had some falling out or anything, we're just... not that sort of close. It's very strange, especially since generally my family is really awesome and I like talking to them, but it just never seems to occur to me to do so.)

I have no idea what's going on in anyone else's life, but I've sorted my Facesock's farm on Farmville to my satisfaction, gotten terribly bored of Tumblr (except for the Sailor Moon stuff), apparently made enough passive-aggressive tweets about my university being irritating about accessibility & disability issues that the student newspaper contacted me to ask if I wanted to write a column (no, because then I'd have to read the student newspaper, which proudly published an article last year about how Roman Polanski was an innocent woobie who was just framed by the system because if the 13 year old girl he raped didn't want to be raped then she shouldn't have let herself be raped), and have written exactly 0 words of my thesis since last I reported the number of words I'd written on my thesis, but HEY. My imaginary pixel trees are all nicely in order now.

I think I may have finally gotten to the point where whatever procrastination is left in my soul is just bored of procrastination, because the big things I'm looking forward to today are having tea with Ginny & Ysa (and some guys that are married to various people at this tea party but they're not as important) and then actually sitting down and writing rather than... well, anything else, actually. (Well, and Karate, but I scheduled myself to be in three places at once today so I threw everything that wasn't Ginny & Ysa and tea to the wolves.) I feel kinda bad about it because I don't want to ignore my friends, but my thesis smells like freesia really is quite nifty and it would be better if I actually wrote it so I could share it with the world.

( Oh internet, let me tell you about this part of my thesis because it's really fascinating to me )

Arg, so tired. I had more thoughts on this. I guess I'll just have to write my thesis, huh?

In order to get back on track I need to have two chapters written in the next 6 days. This may actually be doable, if I buckle down and do nothing else. Which, conveniently, I can (after tea).

♥

Coming up for air from thesis-writing to rec a vid: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by damned_colonial. Lady Pirates! Fans! Guns! Sails! Joan Jett singing "Bad Reputation"!

I also posted one of my fav vegetarian recipes, Leek, Pepper and Pea Tortilla on omnomnom last night. (It's a foodie comm on DW.)

So far today I have written 1172 words of shitty-first-draft of Chapter 2. I hate them all.

[My self-appointed to-do list is getting really really long. Is anyone shocked by this?]

So, meloukhia (who is awesome) put up another post at Feministe today that is a video with description and transcript.

I'm not terribly interested in the video (I'm not really into the visuals in videos unless they're fanvids) but I'm really interested in the transcript.  meloukhia does an awesome job on both the transcript and the description, and transcripts are, as you know, a Thing I Care About.

I view this as the Platonic Ideal of a transcript & description.  As someone who has no desire to watch said video, I know what is going on in it.  It's really awesome and well done.

I admit - because transcripts like this are very difficult to produce, I have posted fewer videos than I had in the past.  I'm not a big video person, so I'm sure no one has noticed the lack, but I'm aware of it.  I know that, in order to allow everyone to participate in a conversation about a video, I need to do a lot of work, and I'm lazy.  Rather than exclude anyone, I just don't much talk about videos anymore.

I don't really feel this is a loss.

There are videos that I think really do need a wide-ranging audience.  I'm in the (strangely going slowly) process of transcribing a few videos right now, and I've found an awesome partner who has agreed to do the visuals for me.

I know we often talk about working together to do transcripts, because everyone knows they're time consuming.  I don't like the way we talk about this, though.  Like we're somehow doing the Poor Folks Who Can't Deal With Video A Favour.  No we're not.  We're acting like they are part of the audience.  They are value-added.

I'm all for doing work around transcripts - I also regularly email creators of videos asking for transcripts, and I have instructions on how people can put up captions on YouTube videos and I do think that a google group or DW-community of folks willing to do transcripts - partials, in tandem, or on their own - would be useful.  But I think these are all necessities, not extras.

I should poke around DW and see if folks would be willing to do a transcript-share community.

AAAA! Thesis proposal deadline & "defense" date has been set! AAAAA! AAAA!

*panics*