my dissertation scares me like thinning hair and my nose getting bulbous with age

alrighty. so back to the problem at hand. you see, i have this dissertation thingy to write. and it's a lotta words. lemmie tell ya. what i have accomplished so far (while not entirely true) feels like what my blog post pic illustrates. a whole lotta nuttin'. i mean sure. it is kinda like writing the great american (canadian?) novel. it's big. it has to start somewhere. and it feels like it is never gonna end. i don't want this to be a bitch and moan session - oh pobre me - i have the entire summer to write a draft of a dissertation that like, four people total, will probably end up reading. i know, i know. woe is me. rather, i would like to either shame myself into it (a particular strategy that i excel at) or at least come up with a productive means of, you know, doing something, um, productive. as a side note, last time i visited the dentist, i asked the dental hygienist to shame me into flossing more (even though she didn't notice that i floss, um, sporadically - and i'll try to stop saying um now) and she thought that was 1) self destructive in some way and 2) kinky. i have since changed dentists. i mean, if you can't productively shame me into action, what good are you?

so i have this weird thing that i know i'll finish, and i know i'll finish in good time, but i need to fret about it. i need to be all like, "damn, i'm procrastinating, isn't that bad?" or "i have a new deadline, poor me, huh?" maybe it is the exorbitant attention i need, OR maybe it is part of my process. this is a conclusion i came to perhaps a couple of years ago (or like, yesterday) and i have tried to go with the flow of it instead of resist it. a fellow blogger, author and artist recently remarked in her facebook status that faith means more than effort (you know who you are). i guess this is the resounding idea behind my "process" idea. i fret. i worry. but i always have faith that what must get done will get done. and it does. faith instead of effort. i should get it tattooed. another one of my dear sweet friends, J., frets for fun i'm sure. and it makes her a functional adult and academic. perhaps fretting makes us feel important. functional. or dysfunctionally productive. or somethin'.

so back to shame. i actually think shame operates as a motivator for me. doesn't anyone else feel this way? i mean, you can be shamed by someone and their judgement can motivate or it can squash. which sounds better to you? perhaps it is highly dysfunctional, but i think the best kind of shame is personal shame. it is a motivator, a sidekick, a best friend. or maybe just mine. whatevs. my point is, that everyone's process is unique, possibly dysfunctional, and ultimately productive, right? we all get stuff done. i mean obviously, we should all be less judgmental, to others and ourselves, but don't we all live in a world that compels us to live up to the expectations of others in order to avoid their disappointment and our inevitable shame? perhaps it is just a matter of not taking responsibility of oneself. i mean, i have to assume that my supervisor cares about deadlines set, or dissertations written, otherwise why would i produce? i have to create a spiral of expectation and shame. otherwise nothing matters - right? i'm not a masochist okay? i'm just justifying why i am not doing stuff, why that is okay, and why it will all work out in the end. in an obviously tongue-in-cheek, non-creepy way. right? gulp.

as for productivity, here are some simple solutions to take my mind off actually doing work.

1) obviously, faith, not effort. perhaps my dissertation will be written on faith alone. does that mean i can take a vacation?

2) personal shame is the answer to all life's roadblocks.

3) watch oprah when experiencing writer's block.

4) assume my supervisor has more investment than i do in actually getting things done. that way, they will. come hell or highwater.

5) go outside and drink chai lattes (my new ingestive of choice) for inspiration.

6) instead of doing research, make phonecalls. long-distance ones to people you haven't spoken to in a long time in order to maximize the call length and time-wastage.

7) make lists on your blog that mean nothing. to anybody. including yourself.

8) enjoy facebook's new chat system.

9) consider ways to make my life more eco-friendly in acknowledgment of earth day. and/or get irritated by sandra bullock schlepping her soy-based candles after following #3 above.

10) consider other career opportunities that do not require a completed phd. suggestions?

any others to add? also, feel free to shame me now that i've fired my dental hygienist. and don't go easy on me as this could happen to you.

indecision

so i changed my blog title. don't judge. i am allowed to be indecisive. at least in the blogosphere. (blogosphere - what does that even mean? don't think too much about it, says the new media studies student. just. don't). indecision does not come easy to me. and that's not something i'm proud of. cause for years i lived in a world (a sphere perhaps?) of black and white. and that's tough lemmie tell ya. tough.

gynormous life decisions have always come relatively easy to me, e.g., while i faltered for a week during christmas break during my first year of university, desperately wanting to drop out and become either a chef or a florist (much to my parent's chagrin and resounding "nos"), by the new year i knew i was going to be a phd student one day. and well. here we are. i would like to say it's the little things that get me and while that may be true, it is really the small to medium decisions that boggle me. such as: where should i eat for dinner instead of making dinner? should i like camping? how many drinks are too many? and, my personal favourite - should i continue to think about the health of my arteries or should i just give in and eat french fries all. the. time.? so far, arteries are winning. but i'm not happy about it.

i made a decision to write a short blog entry - something i can't seem to accomplish due to insufficient short-range wit and the fact that this blog may or may not be turning me into an even more rampant egomaniacal attention whore (could you talk more about yerself much?). i don't seem to be sticking to that decision. but maybe that is just it. as long as i have the big life decisions covered i can completely live a life devoid of simple decision-making. some decisions are easy: should i go on a reality t.v. show? no. would i like to? yes. do i like summer? yes. would i like it to be summer all the time. maybe also yes.

i have recently been thinking a lot about having one's own "take" on everything. which is essentially like having a position - perhaps deciding on an opinion - and then deciding to act upon that decision. my take. your take. everybody has a take. that is what makes people seem so annoying sometimes - your takes don't add up or they don't agree with your take. i also think decision-making is about confidence - the confidence to stand behind your take even though everyone else thinks it is spastically uninformed. in my youth - the heady days of "should i be a chef or a florist" - my take was the law. there were no other takes. my take ruled. that was what living in a world of black and white was like. i didn't see shades of gray. as i get older - and with a recent birthday under my belt - i realize that life is full of shades of gray. if we can cobble together a take, than that's something. enough perhaps. existing in academia teaches me this anew every. single. day. and this is not a bad thing. it is perhaps instead an altered mode of being.

so i made a decision to change the name of my blog. and i may or may not stick with it.

so there.

non-academics like me, they really like me!

so i survived the Northern Voice blogging conference 2008. my first non-academic audience. i didn't expect to be so nervous but all i kept thinking was, what the hell are these people gonna say? i mean, with academics, you know you are going to be stared at, evaluated for levels of smartness, and then criticized. i can handle that. i have practice at that (as a girl growing up in catholic school, i actually excelled at coping with this at a young age. i think they even give out awards for those who don't crack by age 9). but non-academics? real peeps? what can you expect from these people? i, for one, had no idea. and that's why i almost hyperventilated.

i made my usual jokes. i threw in a few slightly off-colour ones to appeal to my unknown crowd. i think i may or may not have said something about penises being pink (in response to a woman in the crowd reporting the high incidence of penis pictures being sent to her in the context of one online dating site in particular. i acknowledge that this is a racialized comment. it is like saying pink coloured pencils are "flesh"-toned when they in fact only represent one colour of flesh. for this, i am sorry). i also may or may not have encouraged divorce for those who feel missed out on online dating. what can i say? i was frenzied. hopped up on starbucks new skinny lattes (which i used to have to describe but now i can just say a hazelnut skinny latte! the ease! and now the baristas don't laugh at me. um...did i just out myself as a starbucks douche? methinks i let the cat slip out of the bag. don't judge. unless you are an academic).

anyhoo. overall, it went well. i spent too much time on academic-y stuff which was to be expected. about mid-way through my ramble, one audience member was like, "so what were your conclusions?" and i was like, "okey dokey, let's just get down to business then." apparently non-academics are interested in conclusions. who knew? i am used to just talking a blue streak, throwing foucault out there a few times, and calling it a day. i realized, only after, that the best part of my talk was relaying how dating is dating no matter what. isn't that friggin' profound folks? i didn't know i had it in me. an audience member was like, "so is it different or not?" (okay, they were actually really polite but in my hadn't eaten, skinny latte, nerves-induced state, they all looked like horned devils spitting fire at me, okay?). and it was kinda liberating to be like, you know, it's not. well actually, i digressed and said that theoretically, there are significant differences, like the gendered patterns of dating in particular, but when it comes right down to it, dating is dating. so thanks horned devil with the immaculate insight. i might just have a dissertation here.

or a article for O magazine. whatevs.

fat and unfit: the paradox of online honesty

i have been marinating a paper that i plan to submit as a chapter in a upcoming book on matchmaking practices in the 21st century. but, as you well know, i am inordinately obsessed with fat of late. it is all i can see. think about. write about. this fact has been exacerbated by the new year's new you weight-loss resolution advertising and the general cultural obsession with fat on any given sunday. i have been reading about what it means for fat women to inhabit socio-culturally constructed "unfit" bodies and hear how their narratives are imbued with pain, rejection, and despair. it seems that fat sucks. yet it is part of life that non-normative bodies exist. and these women prevail despite slurs and fear-mongering. despite rejection and abjection. they survive.

all things considered, this chapter has to be about how the visuality of fat further mediates the online dating process. seeing fat. inspecting for jiggly bits. coming to terms with disordered BMIs. this is part and parcel of the process for men. they assume the responsibility of policing the bodily boundaries of the women they consider potential dates. they visually inspect. evaluate. decide. but this is not to say that women are agency-less in the expression and inhabitation of their larger-sized selves. the fact remains that women, even in their individual understandings of their embodied appraisals by others, do not hesitate to be who they are. they do not hide in shame, nor "inauthenticate" their profiles. they are upfront and above all else, honest. can we say the same of men who reject, deny, and displace based on a hip-to-waist ratios? not that this is a judgment. rather, it is an analysis. of what matters in matters of online love.

one central paradox that continuously puzzles me is how normalizing discourses elide the actuality of differently-sized individuals. similar to the certainty we feel about fundamental, genetic, inherent differences between men and women, we as cultural producers seem to think that denial of differently positioned bodies is appropriate. that by holding on to ideals of thin fitness, we can compel them. will them. through sheer shame alone. one of the very basic ideas i continuously try to present to my students is that critical sociology provides us with ways of thinking that allow for alternate discourses to be heard. that allow us to reject, or at least critique, discourses of oppression. one such discourse, pervasive in contemporary Canadian society, is the obesity morality tale. the individualizing, isolating, shaming discourse of "it is all your fault."

so perhaps i'm wrong. perhaps it is not such a paradox after all. non-normative bodies are acknowledged.

if only to say, its thinness or death.

topical creams

when i was doing my master's degree, which as i have previously mentioned, was the ethnographic study of a nude beach, a wise old (to me at the time) phd student told me that like any topic, this topic too would grow tired. old. and i'd be over it. at the time a was taken back, aghast. no, i thought to myself, the novelty of nudity will NEVER wear off. never. that wise old phd student was right. one day and 150-something pages later, nudity got old. tired. boring. hard to believe, i know.

now that i am drowning in my data (40 transcribed interviews + 24 follow-up interviews = a crapload of words to analyze), i fear that online dating too might lose its glossy sheen of excitement. this is the excitement i see on people's faces when i tell them my topic. after they politely ask what my topic is, cringingly awaiting my response that they fear will be boring enough to make them die on the spot, or at the very least, excuse themselves to use the washroom, i tell them "online dating" and the mood significantly changes (not quite so visibly as when i used to tell people i studied a nude beach, but still, a visibly relieved reaction nonetheless). they are excited. happy that i won't bore them. pleased to get an inside peak into the seemingly (the hopefully) seedy underworld of online dating.

perhaps topics begin to bore us because when we translate them into academicese, they lose some of their lustre. their bang. and perhaps that is what has me caught in a holding pattern. how to analyze without dissecting? how to translate without something lost? how to be relevant, topical when nothing about online dating is easily decoded, outlined, expressed in simplistics such as: online dating works, online dating is bad, online dating isn't real dating, etc. the position i have put myself in isn't new. when you choose a topical topic, easy answers are demanded. yet i resist them. and maintain my holding pattern.

i truly believe that much of research is intuitive. it comes from somewhere unknown. within. deep, dark and hidden perhaps. it takes a formidable bearing to follow your gut into the seemingly unintuitive realm. against the grain of easy answers. and toward the itch that needs to be scratched. even though it elides the provocative and slips toward the academic. the jargon-filled. the abstract. it must be done.

so here goes nothing.

anxious much?

of course i shouldn't be surprised, but anxiety is alive and well for me and my academic colleagues. in this post-xmas apparent disaster of unfinished papers, projects, living amongst the debris of all those unachievable goals (such as: i am going to read every single book on my topic over the break, i am going to finish all my research, my comps, my dissertation, etc.) that we deliriously, giddily, outlined for ourselves back in the heady days of december, when the holiday season promised to be with us forever, we find ourselves sad, anxious, unmotivated, and most vomit-inducingly, overwhelmed.

everyone i have talked to is either: scrambling to finish something, prep something, or simply keep themselves from dropping out and becoming a chef. or a florist. or working for walmart (not that there is anything wrong with that). psst. i'll let you in on a little secret about those of us in academia: we are overachievers with underdeveloped emotional intelligence. we think to ourselves, "poor us that we have so much to do, so much to become, so much knowledge to pack into the 5% of our brain that we actually have access to." we pity ourselves for getting to do meaningful work. for getting two weeks off a christmas and then, god forbid!, have to go back and slog over the topics that we are passionate about, teaching that helps us to grow, change, and evolve as people, and communities of knowledge that sustain us in friendship and in intellectual growth.

poor us.

it is sad for us really.

however, as foolish as i make it sound, or as facetiously as i try to slough it off, i think all of us suffer from taking ourselves too seriously sometimes. from thinking that we are extremely important. and that, somehow, the world does, in fact and unquestionably, revolve around us. whatever the reason we do this, we start thinking along these lines: that the world will end if the paper doesn't get done, if the course isn't perfect, if the report isn't our finest work. but it never does. and still we worry. we obsess. we overwhelm easily.

as is a common refrain on this blog, i don't have the answer(s). but instinctively i feel the problem lies in the over-evaluation of our own individual importance (not that we aren't all special, ya'll). in seeing the revolutions of the world as too fixed in our own orbits. we don't realize that everyone strives to be and do their best. that people most often don't do things to us (judge, evaluate, disdain) but for themselves (to quell their own feelings of worry, insecurity, uncertainty). that everyone exists in the worry of their own making and are not, could never be, as concerned with what you are doing, how you are doing, as they are in evaluating their own goodness, bestness, ability, inability... perhaps then, the answer lies in a shift of focus. off ourselves and onto others. in being sensitive to the worlds of others' making.

to trust our greatness to the care and nurturance of others.

or perhaps...

we (well, um, i) could just chill the f*ck out. ;P