So, another day gone and I'm deeper in...

Yikes. All I accomplished today was to save my transcribed interviews onto my computer from my email, re-save them in plain text, and save them in Nudist for later analysis. I cancelled on my spinning class, ate chips and chocolate, made a disappointing dinner (though I have to say, I am a new fan of spaghetti squash - Mr. There Yet thinks it's too mushy, but I just thought it was cool...), watched too much t.v. (design shows that remind me of what I can't afford - I swear that these home decorating shows and magazines are secretly funded by home furnishing stores and paint/wallpaper places). And so now, although I have to be up too early tomorrow morning, I can't calm down enough to sleep because I'm so consumed with guilt. And then when I try to make meta-attributions about how difficult it is to switch gears between such different tasks as marking and dissertationing, etc., etc., etc., I feel even more guilty because I know so many more people who are working so much harder for me, etc. etc. AAARrrrgh!!!

Tomorrow I'm going shopping with a friend whose looking for a wedding dress, but I tell you, on Thursday, I'm going to be a machine. A slow, steady machine with a to-do list clutched tight in her vise-like grip. I won't set expectations that are too high and impossible to meet (thus guaranteeing failure and giving me an excuse to give up). I will create a reasonable amount of work to be achieved, and move systematically through the list.

1. pick up papers/marking key at school (make excuses about lack of progress to advisor who is also who I have to see to get the papers/marking key)
   
2. find sessional instructor to get summer t.a. contract signed
3. give last interview to transcriber for transcription
4. say hello to friend who may be in from out of town
5. say hello to friend who works at school
6. attend spinning class
7. mark

That sounds like a good amount of work. What I need to do is figure out is how to work on marking and on my dissertation at the same time. Because I have at least 2 more sets of marking coming to me in the next two weeks, and I just can't put off working on my dissertation that long. I was talking with my mother today, who was lamenting that she had never seen me so into my work before all this marking hit me.
And it's true.
The incredibly strange and wonderful thing is that I really love my dissertation topic. I hated it for a long time, when I was trying to create the proposal, and was struggling with a huge fear of evaluation (the comps process was a bit touch and go for me) and my poor advisor (who is one of the best advisors of any advisor I have ever met, and I have all good things to say about him) was willing to accept random paragraphs from me just to get me writing. And I had to read a thousand of the driest, most boring, and least relevant articles that were tangentially associated with my topic because there has been so little academic research on my area of interest. All of this in the context of me being in a program with which I have major epistemological, pedagocial, and interpersonal differences. It was a dark time, let me tell you.

And then I discovered qualitative research, and it was cool, but still, I was trying to get this proposal past my committee, and I was talking about what I wanted to research, and at no point in time did I really have a focused sense of what I wanted to find out. I couldn't even come up with a title for my proposal, because I was that unclear about what I was researching. And everyone (except my advisor) kept telling me I should keep developing my ideas, or that I really should be focusing on this or on that, and I felt increasingly worried, because I knew enough about my topic to know that I didn't want to focus on this or on that, and that there was nothing left in the literature for me to read that I hadn't already read, but I obviously wasn't communicating my ideas in a way that inspired confidence in others (except my advisor).

But I wrangled approval from my committee and dug into data collection, and based on a pilot study, created a (very loose) interview schedule, and started interviewing people. And, I have to say, it was like magic. Because everything came from them. This is not to say that I was a totally passive passenger or anything, but all the content came from my participants. And regardless of the fact that I intellectually understood that, in my heart, I was terrified that, at the end of 15 interviews, I would have no better idea of what to say than when I started. And just the opposite has happened, I've barely started the analysis, and already I have more to say than I could have imagined. And my fear that everything would remain at a descriptive level, and I would stand up in front of my defense committee with no theory to refer to, and they would say, how could you possibly think you deserve your Ph.D. when all you've done is provided us with the equivalent of a magazine article? That was taken care of too. I have theory jumping off the page. I have distinct differences between my participants that I can explain using theory. And you have no idea what a relief that is to me.

So now I just need to figure out how to take this massively rich, exciting information, and jam it into a survey that I need to do because my field isn't that excited by qualitative research methods, and to make it an easy defence, I'm cow-towing to expectations and including a survey. But so much of the cool stuff from the interviews doesn't make sense as a closed answer survey question. Anyway...

O.k., so that posted, I think I'm getting the hang of this.

I also recently got pulled into Facebook - which is making me reflect on this whole electronic communication phenomenon. I seem to be on the high end of the age of Facebook users, and everyone I know on Facebook seems to have signed up for it in the last 3 weeks - I think there would be some sort of interesting sociogram-type study to be done there. Perhaps social networks on Facebook develop in a manner similar to the way infections spread. I am not falling into the facebook void, however - I'm constantly amazed at how often people update their sites. That said, it was very fun to find people I lost track of over 10 years ago...

Now, I should establish a ground point, a baseline from which I can compare my progress this summer.

• I am finished my data collection for Study 1.
• I must analyse said data (interviews) to create a survey for Study 2.
  
• I must gain my committee's approval of my survey
• I must find people to whom I can send my survey
• I must achieve about a 50% return rate by shamelessly offering desirable prizes for participating in my study
• I must analyse Study 1 data (qualitative analysis - never done it before)
• I must analyse Study 2 data (quantitative analysis - having done it before, I'm not thrilled to be doing it again)
• I must re-write my entire introduction, update my methods, write up my results, and tie all of it together in a discussion
• Again, I must gain my committee's approval
• Defense

The plan was to send out the survey in May, but I was ambushed by marking for my (slightly overlapping) 3 t.a.'s. And I wondered, why am I insane enough to have taken on 3 t.a.'s? How can I possibly have thought that would be a good idea? I'm finally getting on a role here, I'm interested in what my Study 1 participants have had to say, I'm enjoying boring everyone I know by talking ad nauseum about my first reflections on my interview data, and now I have to put it all away for 4 weeks (which is an eternity to be away from your research when you're trying to figure out what you have in front of you) and mark undergraduate essays and exams, and be disappointed once again in the willingness among these students to plagiarize, and their stupidity in thinking that I can't tell the difference between their writing and the writing of a professional researcher, but then I remember that I need to eat and pay rent, and I sigh and I keep marking, because where else will I make $30/hour?

So, right now I'm in a brief window between marking, and rather than dig back into my survey design ideas, I'm starting a blog. Yes, that's right, I'm starting a blog. Because I need help getting back into the flow, and when you work at home with no one around to chat idly, to toss ideas around, then it's hard to get back in the flow. Especially because I know that in 2 days, I'll be back to marking. Hmm, now I'm feeling guity that I'm blogging instead of reading. Perhaps I'll assuage that guilt by making lunch. A gir's gotta eat, right?

testing 1, 2, 3

So I am unsure about the technical aspects of blogging, but I am certain that I need some sort of outlet for my procrastination, and I am rationalizing time spent blogging by telling myself that it will serve as some sort of log of my progress, and perhaps will even help me to focus my energies on that which they should be focused on - the completion of my Ph.D.