Self-Disciplining, or, What a Stupid Weekend

A guy I took a class from at Oregon once noted that "there are only two kinds of grad students: those who finish their dissertations and those who do not."

The thing with graduate school is that, especially once you start on your own research, no one is making you do anything. There's a constellation of professors you work with sometimes, possibly some other grads who are halfway interested in your work, but mostly you're just kind of alone with some books and a computer. You can, for instance, play video games non-stop for three days and no one will scold you. You can take off your pants and lie on the floor. You can go the library and look out the window at the squirrels. Nothing gets done and no one else cares.

I gather this gets even worse once you're ABD - I, at least, have a very finite number of weeks until everything is due for my QE, and fewer weeks still until I have to take the Italian exam. After that, you're like a little dumb boat in a big dumb sea, with nowhere in particular to go.

The social stuff I've done this weekend has been fun: drinks and Thai food, more drinks and a slide show, a walk in a park with a kiddo and her mom, and tonight the third innovation after watches and banking that the Swiss have managed to come up with: fondue. All of the work I've done, however, has been half-assed and lame. Here's hoping that some completely badass stroke of inspiration strikes at some point this week. I really need it.

Listless, everyone. I'm feeling very listless.