If a blog about one's dissertation progress is to be meaningful at all, one must be brutally honest, I think. Or at least brutal.

I am utterly uninterested in doing this anymore. No way, no how. I didn't get much of anything done yesterday. I didn't hear back from my advisor. (Is anything worse than having to send the e-mail of shame? Oh yeah, wait, not hearing back from the person you had to send it to.) And I don't really want to be in the Cage today. Not that there's anywhere else I want to be, unless it is Sunnydale, or Hogwarts or Pemberly. It is too hot to be at home. (Spousal Unit looks at the window unit air conditioner we have sitting on the floor in the basement like it is a strange, evil machine specially designed to shred cash.) AND, I dreamed last night for the second time in a week that while I was babysitting somebody else's children one of them died while I wasn't looking or taking care of them properly. I was kind of confused about what this meant until Spousal Unit, wise, yet tightfisted one, said "could it be about revision -- that whole killing babies thing? (See post Day 8) Big slap to my forehead, and damn you, Stephen King for giving my subconscious a horribly brutal metaphor to run with.

Today, the dissertation is just too hard. I'm not enjoying it. I'm not really learning anything except how to climb metaphorical emotional mountains. And I think that is a lesson I just don't need to learn. And worse, I really don't have anything left to say about my subject. Nor can I think of any more new ways to say the same old stuff I already did say. I'm freaked out stressed, totally overwhelmed, and I spent the morning watching Felicity instead of working. (there's that brutally honest part). And did I mention the Very Big Goddamned Bells just finished a 3 hour concert???!!!!!

In the few hours I have left before they kick me out of the Cage, I desperately need to make some kind of movement on this or else tomorrow will be an impossible day. So, I'll leave with an Ani DiFranco quote: "I'll do my best swandive, into shark infested waters."