specialagency.net

There wasn't even any wine.

We had a department reception this week, which felt like one big conversational minefield. Due to an unfortunate quirk of demographics, I'm one of the senior graduate students in history of science, which means that a lot of other students keep asking me about the dissertation-writing process. I don't have the heart to tell them that, at this point, dissertation-writing involves more watching television and baking muffins than it does actual research and writing.

After forty-five minutes of nodding vaguely when people said things like "so if you're not teaching these days, what do you do? You just get up in the morning and start writing?" it was a relief to run in to Daniel. Daniel's in my cohort, he took his exams last spring and submitted a prospectus and spent the summer researching (although his summer was in Paris, while too much of mine was in Worcester and Baltimore). I liked Daniel's take on the dissertation process: "there's no time, you know? I have to make breakfast in the mornings, and then read the newspaper, and I have to go to the gym every day. Every day! Because I'm still on the market, you know? If I'm going to find a boyfriend in San Francisco, I have to look good. So there's that, and then when it's nice in the afternoon it would be such a waste to be working instead of enjoying the weather." He says he used to run instead of going to the gym, but his time in the army just killed his knees. "I gave my country my cartilage, you know? It's only fair."

Daniel was, sadly, the exception. I got stuck in a corner listening to a visiting scholar talk about dealing with his newly-adolescent children. "It's like a second birthing, only it's harder because I'm involved in this one. I was involved in the first one, I mean, I was there for the first, I was in the room, and I cut the umbilical cord, but it wasn't my womb being stretched, so this is very different." That was when I started making excuses about having to leave, having a bus to catch.