On Funding, Waiting and Nesting

Is it wet yet?  When will it be wet?  Will I like it when it's wet?

A non-update (and a cat picture, because when in doubt, cats illustrate many things).  I have had meetings, meetings, meetings the past week or so about my "funding situation," which is to say, various people want to know whether someone else has given me funding for next year so that I can be checked off as a problem to be taken care of.  For funding which various people are in charge of, though, the answer is: we'll know next month.  Wait and see.  We don't know yet.  

The problem seems to me to be a lack of planning.  I am not in the situation of needing a job or not having an income next year--I have two years of guaranteed funding left, so for at least two years I won't be kicked out into the cold.  But exactly what kind of funding I have, and whether it depends on my teaching in Overcast or not (and therefore, how much travel I will be able to do for research) is partially dependent on how many graduate students are admitted to the program for next year, and whether applications which my advisor has put in for me are accepted.

On the Possibility of Being a Trailing Spouse

What you mean I got to move, two-legs?

All those fellowship rejection letters are rolling in (with a few yes-letters), and they've thrown my comfortable grad school routine of enroll-TA-complain out of order.  I didn't get the big fellowships I applied for, but I have gotten enough small ones to patch together a year of funding not dependant on being a TA.  Which would mean a year of research and writing as my full-time job (which is a thought terrifying by itself).

But Snooty U also requires that if you don't TA, you have to be at least 100 miles away from Overcast during your non-TAing semesters, and now requires a lease or some other proof of this (they didn't used to be so strict about it).  It's like an academic restraining order.  (Not to diminish the importance of real restraining orders).  But what it means is that the one place I cannot be is Overcast.

And since J has had a year of not working in his chosen field (theater) since there is no theater in Overcast, we've decided to look at moving some place that has both a large university and/or archives for me, and a large theater scene for J.  Those places have been narrowed down to Chicago and Brooklyn, but for a while we were looking at basically the entirety of the northern Midwest and the Northeast.  Terrifying.  My advisor Dr. Asiago has voted for Brooklyn, since my dissertation is New York centered and there are more archives there, but somehow the thought of moving out of Overcast not for a tenure-track job didn't occur to me.  Like I knew it was a possibility that I would go somewhere exciting for research like London or Paris (still in the list of possibilities) but the reality of moving somewhere kind of random half way through grad school didn't really sink in for me until all of these funding sources started to fall into place recently.  (I know, what a problem to have, right?)

The lovely Ethel Louise had a post up a while back about frogging graduate school--in a knitting metaphor, to rip out all the foolish things you did and redo it with knowledge of those foolish things.  It's not directly related to the possibility of temporarily being a trailing spouse, but it's been rolling around in my head thinking about where my life is going and whether I'd have made the choices I've made over again.  This moving thing has really given me pause, but I think it's more about the moving than about graduate school causing me to move.  I grew up living outside a town of less than 500, and went to school in a town of less than 5000, so the thought of living in Brooklyn or Chicago gave me a little panic attack when it went from "wouldn't it be cool if" to "the university says you have to be out of town by January 1."

And in a lot of ways, I'm fortunate in ways some trailing spouses aren't: our decision to move is going to be largely shaped by where I can work in archives, and the impetus to move is coming from my job and not J's.  So I guess this is all a long way of saying that the change in my situation has made me appreciate the uncertainty traveling spouses like AB deal with.

I've been kind of sitting on this post for a while because it's been hard to write.  And some of my funding is still uncertain, but as of now, it looks like we'll be in Overcast for the summer and fall, and moving (somewhere) in January.  I can't really bear the thought of deciding what of our stuff to sell and what to move right now, which is silly, but like I said in my post about gardening, this apartment feels like the closest to home right now because of the marks J and I have put on it together, and of course another apartment would have that eventually, but it's hard to think about right now.  Hopefully there will be a post soon about some happily finished knitting and sewing projects to make up for this downer.

Mildly productive

Dinosaurs love homemade beer

My dreaded meeting with Dr. Asiago actually went great--he handed me my prospectus draft and said things looked great, except for the footnotes.  Which, being as my citations and notes are all crazzy, were not complete or very pretty.  So those will get cleaned up, a bibliography attached, and the thing will finally be done.  So the rest of the meeting was spent listening to Dr. Asiago rant about the many problems of the department.  Dr. Asiago, per his usual, complained at about the current first year grad students, the incoming students, the undergrads, other faculty, meetings, book reviews, cable TV about ghost hunting, and other faculty.
Which is not to say that there aren't many problems with the department; I just hope the departmental politics he's mad about won't shut me out of funding or something, since he's butting heads with people who control that kind of thing.  All the more reason to get done with the PhD as soon as possible.

I'm wondering also if I'm going to be Dr. Asiago's only advisee for a very long time.  I'm his first grad student, and it doesn't sound like he's going to take another student for the foreseeable future.  Partly, at least from his end, because of said departmental politics.  I don't know what that means for my networking or having a reputation when I go on the job market.  My other committee members have between a few and lots of students, so I'm not totally high and dry, but it just seems like an odd situation.

My office cleaning reward

The rest of the day was spent gleefully not writing a thing.  J and I went shopping at the used book store, a junk/antique shop, and a fabrics thrift store.  I found some beautiful vintage lace; not sure where the beaded one is going to end up, but there's four yards of it and it's so pretty.  Our beer is bottled and carbonating; we opened a bottle today just to check, and it's getting along pretty well.  There's not much carbonation yet or much head, but the flavor is maturing from what it was in the carboy.  The carbonation should build over the next month, but the lack of head is from a lack of protein and won't change.

I've been fussing over my digital and real life organizational systems since that archives notes workshop, and not getting very far.  I did, however, clean my office back to a useable state, which makes tackling my hard paper files easier to think about. I bought my first two drawer filing cabinet this summer, and I hate to even write this, but I think I need to buy another one.  Maybe a bigger one.  Everything goes in there, and even though it's all filed neatly, it's just about bursting because I've stuffed too much paper in it.

No progress on the digital refiling project.  I've fooled around with Zotero and can't get it to import citations from my library website, which makes it useless for me.  I might go back to RefWorks, or just despair at the thought of putting together a comprehensive bibliography.  One of the ideas presented at the notes workshop was to just keep one central word or spreadsheet file with citations and brief descriptions, and a note about where to find the file the document photo or PDF is in.

I'm playing with the idea of making an html document with local links to my research photos, so that I can search my citations and link to photos directly.  This appeals to me because it would be searchable and could show the photo or PDF with a single click, instead of hunting through files, but changing anything or even throwing it on an external drive would break all the links.  It also has the downside of all the citations would have to be entered by hand.  I have to think about it a little more.  Cleaning the physical office is a lot easier than trying to get my digital house in order.

This is how we do

Very well read houseplants

V Day at chez Construction was very chill--work for J, class, microfilm and a workshop on archives note taking for me.  J's presents--two houseplants I've been waaaaanting for a long time--are up on the book shelf that gets the most light.  

Then lots and lots of delivery Thai food (fried tofu and fried bananas in the same meal?  Yes please!) and a good day was had by all.  There may be some Super Mario in the near future as well. 

The archival notes workshop was a lot of repetition of things I've found out myself the hard way, but two professors showed how they file things on their computers to keep track of them, and that's got me thinking about the mess that is my own system.  Which was a system before I started doing a lot of archival work, but is now a smoking pile of ruin and too many photos.  Dr. Asiago wants a detailed primary bibliography of everything I've worked on so far and everything I know about but haven't seen, and it's been a huge pain to put together because I haven't kept a running central list of everything I've looked at.  So I suppose there will soon be posts about shuffling research files around on my computer or something equally boring.

I've also got a meeting with him tomorrow that I'm sort of dreading about the prospectust that won't die--rather than reading the newest draft and OKing it, he "wants to talk about it."  Which means that there's probably another draft in the near future as well.

Our regularly schedule programming

Modeling courtesy of my beat-up ducktape
dress form

The February round of fellowship applications is written and sent out; now the March round begins. When I finish the March round, I'll be done with this year's fellowship application marathon and will allow myself to start another dress. Round 1's dress is done, and turned out very well. Waiting til I'm done with the next round of apps to start the dress is a little arbitrary, since I'm teaching J to sew his own shirts, but at least it will make it so there's only one fabric explosion covering the house.

The dress was relatively quick and easy.  I used Simplicity 2588, but did a couple of modifications: The bodice was faced, and I added a lining, which made the back zipper trickier, and I added the pocket details and the ruffle at the bottom.  The pattern was also extraordinarily tall and had waaaay too much ease: despite my measurements matching the pattern sizing guide exactly, I had to shorten both the skirt and the bodice by an inch and a half, and take in the bodice quite a bit.  I've found out that I looooove working with piping also.  It's a very fun detail, and although I love the fabric, I think it would have been a little much without the accent.  It's turned out well, but the muslin looked like a nightmare.

Speaking of nightmares, I've been having this recurring dream in which Dr. Asiago emails me to ask why I'm not applying for a fellowship whose application is due tomorrow.  I've been writing these applications to the neglect of real dissertation writing, and I know it's for a good cause, but he keeps telling me to apply to these grants that are due in only a few days (in real life as well as in the dream).

I'll be glad when the spring round is done and I have a few months of reprieve to do some dissertating.  One of my other committee members, who we'll call Dr. Smackdown, has written a lot of my letters of rec, and recently wrote me that she expects I'll get so many fellowship grants I won't be able to use them all.  I think this was her way of saying she's done writing letters, because I could only hope to be so lucky.  Even getting half the ones I'm applying for would be great, as last year's grants only had a 30% success rate.

Progress

Of a sort. I finished Dr. Asiago's book, and I feel horrible saying this, but it was so boring. He does military/political/diplomatic history, and I'm much more interested in social/cultural/diplomatic history. We're interested in many of the same historiographic issues, and of course, the same groups and periods, but very different approaches to them. Not that I have issues with them as scholarly work--there are parts that I'll be re-reading because they say complex things very clearly, but the military/political angle puts me right to sleep.

Also got some writing done. J was off work Tuesday and Thursday (his days off are intermittant and a little random, since he's working retail) and he did some huswifery while I shut myself away in the office to write. Tuesday we got a lot done; we're starting to experiment with making liqueurs, so while J was rolling out forgotten Christmas cookie dough, I put some clemantines and cloves in brandy to sit. Hopefully in 2-3 weeks it'll turn out like homemade Cointreau. Also we drank beer while J made cookies and I wrote fellowship apps and my prospectus; a beer with lunch makes fellowship apps much easier to get to.

I feel like I spend the majority of my time applying for money to do research instead of doing research. They've definitely gotten easier to whip out once I get going, and doing the prospectus has given me some good canned answers to "why this topic? what the historiographic significance?" but they're still so time consuming. They all want slightly different things, and there's so much groundwork before the writing even starts. I just need time away from Overcast Town with no teaching to keep pulling me back here so I can get some research trips in. The library at Snooty U is good about ordering material and getting microfilm, but I hardly have time to keep up with the reading for the class I TA, let alone sit in the library basement for days on end and read microfilm. Especially if I keep getting assigned to teach 20th century courses I have no background or training in. Seriously, why assign an early Americanist to TA courses on 20th century music and politics? I know there's a value in teaching outside the comfort zone, but I barely had 20th century feminism in my comp fields for women's history, and there's not the remotest chance that I'll ever have to teach a 20th century survey.

But I've finally finished J's Christmas socks, so I'm starting a hat for me (pictures later). Yesterday we also finally got our pear cider bottled, after it sat in secondary fermentation for several months. We brewed it in October right after my exams, but never had time to bottle with the holidays, so the upside is that as soon as it's done carbonating, it'll be ready to drink immeadiately. It's definitely smoothed out quite a bit since it was racked. Tomorrow before J goes to work we're going to pitch a blueberry mead (honey wine) and put up a blueberry liqueur. We're just using frozen grocery store blueberries, but I'm excited, and it should be a pretty color.

On Writing

Or at least, on writing the prospectus. My program requires a prospectus/dissertation proposal to be submitted within three months of the comprehensive exams, and I submitted it in time for the official deadline, but my advisor wants another draft done with more substance, or lit review, or something. At least he gave me a lot of comments to work on, as per his usual.

My problem is that I lost all my momentum over the holiday. After a series of small but exhausting family crises, I can't get my head back in the right place. I work best when my partner J is at work and I can devote long, uninterrupted blocks of time to writing, and I had that today, but all I've accomplished is rewriting a few pages of my prospectus. My advisor wants me to elaborate on why I want to write what I want to write, which is important to articulate, but so much harder than just writing BS. It's not that I don't want to work on the prospectus, or that I'm tired of my topic, but that I feel like I lost all the words I crammed into my head last semester. I spent the summer and fall semester of 2010 pushing all of these things into my head so that I would be able to cite on command, and I was able to do that at the end of the semester; that's how I passed my comp exams. And now it feels like it's all gone. I wrote the prospectus with authors in mind, but didn't include them because it wasn't required. Now my advisor wants names and detailed historiography, and I feel like I'm back in my first semester of grad school and I have to re-read review articles to remember who wrote what.

The writing is happening, it's just going very slowly. I think the rest of tonight will be spent trying to finish reading my advisor's book; it came out in October, just after I finished my exams, and I didn't feel like I had the brain power to finish it, so I'm only about half way through it. (I'm a bad advisee). It's both a daunting and a boring read. Boring because I can't skim it for major arguments like I usually do, both because I already know his major arguments and because I need to know what he thinks of some details. Daunting because, for good or bad, my research and my advisor's area of research cover the same groups, the same players, many of the same concerns and mostly the same time period, which means that his books feels sort of like a crib sheet for my work. What does he think of this guy? Check chapter one. What does he think this group was doing? Check chapter three. But maybe finishing the book will help me avoid putting my foot in my mouth in the prospectus.

Square One

Well, it's not exactly square one, because I'm ABD and in the third year of my program, but it's basically square one as far as the dissertation goes. I went ABD in October and I've made very little progress since. One archive visit, some secondary source sifting, and no writing.

I'm in an early American history program, and the dissertation will have feminism, archaeology, material culture, critical race theory, chemistry, religion, and maybe a dog and pony show for good measure. My advisor (who we'll call Dr. Asiago, because his real name sounds like a different sort of cheese) refers to the dissertation like it's its own person: "The dissertation should locate itself at the intersection of X and Y fields; the dissertation has to grab attention; the dissertation can't lose energy." He says I should keep a writing journal, but he also has stacks of paper falling over in his office and walls of filing cabinets. I bought my first little two-drawer filing cabinet this summer and I can't bring myself to make more things I'll have to file later. I'm sure he'd hate to know that I'm starting a dissertation blog, but I'm sure he'd also hate to know that I'm planning on sewing a couple of dresses when I finish my next round of fellowship applications, instead of jumping straight into more fellowship applications.

But hopefully the blog will keep me honest. Being ABD, my only responsibilities are TAing a course unrelated to my dissertation this semester, and I'm hoping to get a couple of short research trips in this semester instead of staying home and fretting. I'm trying to keep my responsibilities and commitments down to leave me time for writing, because in college I had periods of over-commitment when I didn't know whether I was coming or going, but I seem to get more done when I have some deadlines to work towards. Maybe the next step will be goal setting, but first I have to figure out a starting point.