8 months later...

i'm not committed to coming back to this blog full-time or anything and i'm sort of hoping that no one even remembers it exists. i've also decided to broaden the scope, since for me the dissertation has never been the entirity of my life. so perhaps i now enter a new chapter: the dissertating life and its other pleasures. yesterday a friend mentioned that she was trying to come up with other verbs for working on the dissertation besides the typical "dissertating," which we all use in that snarky way, "yeah, i've just been dissertating all fucking day." her neologism: disserbating. and with that, i've decided to find pleasure in disserbating, or at least in life while disserbating. so much of the way that i've thought of my work for so long is as fundamentally masterbatory. i'm always self-dismissive like that. but what about at least noting the pleasures of such mental masterbation? i say bring it on.

this comes at a moment when i've realized that for me writing the dissertation is about showing up. it's about getting my ass to my library carrel and just sitting there all the day. everyday. i feel like i kept getting the advice to treat graduate school like a job, but that formulation never really resonated with me. and while i wish someone would have said "just show up everyday," i'm not convinced that i would have listened until quite recently.

so now i take my cues from horace: never a day without a line.