Turnabout.

Once again I keep getting these flashes of “should really blog that!” and then immediately “but there’s so much unsaid over there.” So, in short:

I defended and graduated.* To paraphrase my landlady, I’m Vika Zafrin, Ph.uckin’ D. That paraphrase involved changing fewer letters than you might imagine. For the first time in my adult life I am not a student pursuing a degree full-time at an institution. Mostly there’s a giant feeling of relief, but I already miss research. Although that balances out, because I sure don’t miss the constant insecurity, the “not good enough”ness, the 24/7 feeling like I have to be working.

OK, I still mostly feel like I should be working. But it’s getting easier to compartmentalize, and you know what? There’s a whole big life out there, with books and spiritual practice and cooking and friends and friends’ children and visits with mom, who lives in driving distance for the first time in thirteen years. Who knew?

Ethan and I have moved up to Boston. Best move we could’ve made. Wanderlust is tugging at my pants leg already, but I could be happy living in Boston for a long while. Given that wanderlust is my muse and near-constant companion, that’s a hefty statement to make.

The house we live in has seven human residents, five cats, a dog and (temporarily) a bird. Gods bless the marvel that is modern allergy medicine. Our two cats have established relationships with the three who have lived here for long. Nochka the tiny black cat has a hissy fit any time DJ Spooky, the black boycat thrice her size, comes into our bedroom seeking food. And there’s the impossibly beautiful lynx-y Winter, who is afraid of almost everyone. Other than that, feline people are chill. Humans are also mostly chill, and really, how bad can it get when you live with geeks and musicians (and a funny man who inexplicably deals with insurance all day)? A circus band occasionally practices in my living room. Beat that with a stick.

The past three months have been spent largely acclimating to the new house, the new life rhythms, the big questions like where to go from here and how to plan out the long term. I’m working outside of academe now, but who knows how long I’ll be able to stay away?

So much is changing. Mostly I like it. Some of it is hard growth, but on the whole I feel like I’m stretching after a long sleep.

*Oh, and my work? Here, in its entirety. Get yourself Firefox and enjoy. It’ll take half a minute or so to load, but is thereafter very fast.

[RolandHT] Lesson learned today.

Even if I have a ton of material to write out, under “normal” conditions (i.e., deadline is not within two or three days) there seems to be a word limit to what I can write. It’s a loose word limit, but it’s there — and it does not matter how much time I spend on writing these words. Happily, this limit is generous enough that I’m pretty optimistic about finishing.

Also, having less time and/or a firm stopping time — a dinner date, for example — helps productivity in direct proportion to how much time I have left. In other words, work tends to speed up if I know I must stop at a certain hour. But that’s not news.

Excerpted tidbit.

Just because I feel like sharing. It’s a big ol’ world, and we’re not.

Internet usage worldwide varies more or less in direct proportion to national per capita income. According to the Google Gapminder World project (last accessed 28 January 2007, currently in beta), internet users per 1000 people are as low as 0.78 (Tajikistan). India and China, the two most populous countries, hover near the middle of the GNP/GNI range but count only 32 and 73 internet users per 1000 inhabitants, respectively.

(me, yesterday, in chapter draft)

Edited to add: the “children born per woman (fertility rate)” chart makes it pretty evident that the rapidly approaching overpopulation bogeyman is just that. Replacement rate (for a stable population numbers-wise) is 2.1. India may be above that, but China and a hefty portion of the rest of the world are below. Not only that, but since 1975 (use the nifty animation feature!) worldwide fertility rates have been on the decline.

In addition, the most rapidly growing populations (top left region of the chart) tend to be dark-blue, which means Africa, which means horrid infant mortality rate. (The mortality rate is another one of the charts available.)

Anxiety and timing(s).

Three months left to finish the dissertation, get comments on it, fix the dissertation as per comments, and defend it. The urge to panic is great.

Support, though, is abundant – and I’m grateful for it. From all sides: family, friends, colleagues, relative strangers.

It’s not that I don’t think I can do it. I can… I think. It’ll help to have comments from my thesis readers (who will hopefully get two chapters and all of the interface from me Wednesday or Thursday), so that at least I’ll know more or less what they’re thinking. Part of me is worried that they’ll be disgruntled, because I’ve veered away from (and so haven’t addressed) some things that were suggested at my prelims. But another part of me knows that this is par for the course: dissertations change direction, and this isn’t even that radical a change. It’s “just” a shift in emphasis. But there’re three months left, so – panic.

Anxiety, more like. I’m told (and also know) that it won’t go away, so it helps to let it flow through me instead of dwelling on it and making it whirlpool somewhere near my solar plexus. Sometimes the flowing works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s nice to have some agency over it.

This topic is overwhelming. It’s so poorly explored; there’s so much to do. Most importantly, it’s so interdisciplinary, and I feel like the ultimate dilettante. That’s a-ok with me, but what about the rest of the world? You know, potential employers and such?

One of RolandHT’s early premises was that acquiring knowledge can be done in two ways. You can take in (read, listen to, whatever) large chunks of information, one by one, each of them in its entirety, and analyze each as a whole and in context of the others you’ve taken in so far. Like learning literature by reading novel after novel. Or, you can dabble here and there, follow thematic threads that interest you, and slowly build up a more or less cohesive picture of the world, or a world. The Roland project is the latter; it acquaints you with the archetype(s) by letting you jump around centuries and media and locations. I do this because I think that this is how we learn almost everything we know: building up a worldview by observation, by living and paying attention.

That works very well inside my head; finding words to make it coherent is another thing. Words are coming, slowly but surely. It’ll get there.

The best dissertation is a done dissertation. Yes.

Rewards, or maybe CRACK.

My beloved bought Guitar Hero II. Note the time stamp on this post. And I’m not even into video games much.

It is crack. Also, it’s hell on my left arm, all the way from the forearm to the shoulder.

But oh, the sweet sweet reward for having gotten work done. Dissertation, we have a PLAN.

Practical writing advice sought.

The kind of information I’m looking for, there’s a lot of it on the internets. But somehow it carries more weight when it comes from people I know personally, even if only through the blogosphere.

Say, hypothetically, you’re writing a dissertation (a book, any kind of long writing project). You were all set to dive into work, but life’s been uncooperative, and now that you can think straight again you’re dealing with fear, anxiety and vague waves of unattached guilt. How do you get from there to producing stuff of a quality at least good enough to propel you along?

Strategies I’m familiar with: freewriting, timed and non-; reward systems (I get to play videogames/have some ice cream/take a 15-minute walk for every X amount of work done); timed work schedules (must write 10-noon and not one minute more, every day); buddy systems; changing work venue every once in a while.

Freewriting works to a point, if I don’t let little things slow me down. Rewards work on a very limited scale. Timed work schedule works when I can stick to it and don’t have internet access. Buddy systems… well, they’re nice in theory but in practice there’s nobody I can do this with. Online venues like PhinisheD don’t really work for me either. Changing work venue actually works most of the time. But, although it helps deal with wanting to hide under the covers, it doesn’t help with the fear or anxiety. Or guilt.

So: aside from the above, what do you do?

too much jetsetting

I’m so tired of travel.

On Friday I came back from the latest – to Maryland on Tuesday, to give a talk at MITH; and then DC for the Reinvention Center conference. This was my fourth trip in just under two months: the other three were to Nebraska (digital humanities workshop), Fredericton (text-analysis conference) and Chester, Vermont (Readex Digital Institute, which got extensively blogged here). On Tuesday I leave for Chester again, to return on Wednesday after a meeting. This is the blessed last trip for the foreseeable future.

Don’t get me wrong: all the events I went to have been fabulous (see below), and I’m looking forward to going back to Readex. But – and I’ve known this from the start – this is too much travel right now.

The talk at MITH went well. I guess the crowd was a bit diminished compared to their usual; it was election day, and there was a Human-Computer Interaction event precisely coinciding with my talk. Nevertheless, it was a good group, and boy, they really mean it when they call these things “Digital Dialogues.” They jumped right in about five minutes into my talk, and the lively conversation didn’t stop for the next hour and a half or so. I showed the Virtual Humanities Lab and we talked about collaboration, its logistical issues and benefits-vs-drawbacks and ways in which VHL can be made a more friendly collaboration environment. It was great to receive feedback from people not only interested, but way more knowledgeable about the state of the field. It felt easy to be there; they’ve created a great atmosphere both for conversation and for work.

Wednesday I took advantage of MITH’s generous offer to use their “coffeehouse” space for work. That evening I found myself at the downtown Washington hotel where the Reinvention Center conference was to take place in the next two days.

I’ve a ton of notes from that conference. I only got to go because my dissertation director was leading one of the sessions, and asked me to be his session recorder; this way the Center gives a few grad students the opportunity to see what’s going on in research universities around the country, while at the same time getting young’uns to more or less write the proceedings. A more than fair price, I must say.

So I’d been reasonably interested in the conference, but had no idea how useful it would be and how much new information I would get that will be applicable in my near-future work. For one thing, I saw the largest concentration of high-level university administrators that I’ve ever seen before. Not sure what the ratio of administrators (and staff, like librarians) to faculty was, but it felt something like 2:1 or maybe even 3:1, and perhaps 300 people in attendance. (I may be wildly off here. It’s just an estimate.) I’ll have to go over my notes later and perhaps write it up here, if I get to it.

If I get to it. Friday I came back; and yesterday my adored husband took me out for a romantic evening out that stretched well into this morning. I had no idea what we were doing; turned out, we were going to an Ani DiFranco concert. Well, holy shit: I hadn’t been to a concert in a long, long time, and had only seen Ani in concert once. It was a treat. Not only does she rock the the house, but she is touring while quite pregnant, and her happiness with where she is and what she’s doing could be felt all the way at the back bar where we were standing. She had with her a stand-up-bassist and a percussionist with a xylophone and a steel drum and a bunch of other unusual rhythm instruments. Beautiful sound, mostly good crowd, amazing energy.

Then we reconnected over dinner and conversation and general dalliance. This past summer, going into early fall, was difficult for both of us. We both had to reduce and eventually stop taking anti-depressants: welcome to U.S. health care, which left us scrambling for two months (three in Ethan’s case). In the fall we both dove into new work, and have been trying to catch up with each other ever since. Last evening (orchestrated in part by a kind friend – many thanks!) was a badly needed one.

And now… now there’s more work. The final VHL report to the NEH is due at the end of the month. My write-up of our session at the Reinvention Center conference is due at the same time. I’ve got a job app to send out tomorrow, blessedly almost done but still on the to-do list. Tuesday-Wednesday there’s the trip, and my next task for the dissertation is the transcription and encoding of around 600 lines of poetry. Then there’s another fellowship app to get together.

And then there’s the social life, without which Vika gets to be a dull and sad girl. Tonight we were treated by our fabulous housemate to Marie Antoinette the movie, which had an unexpected soundtrack (Aphex Twin!) and was generally not half bad. Monday (tomorrow!) we have a friend visiting. Haven’t seen her in a long long time, so I’m really looking forward to it, and to the inevitable good food associated with the visit.

So what do I do? Instead of getting some sleep I write a long blog entry. Ah well, at least now I have a de facto to do list. There’s more to write about – details of the movie, Sean McMullen’s The Miocene Arrow which I’m enjoying these days, my relationship with the uncertainties of life after May, various anxieties about whether I’ll finish the dissertation in time. But all these can wait. Good night now.

Otuel and Roland, and Scandinavia.

Work is getting easier – sitting down and actually working, that is, as opposed to dreading it and feeling guilty about not doing it. I’ve been on the same primary source since last Thursday, but it is big (over 2700 lines), so I have sixteen whole excerpts from it. Only the Song of Roland has more excerpts. Plus, this one (Otuel and Roland) is in Middle English. Instead of translating it – at which I’d do a miserable job – I’ve written a mini-guide on pronunciation that should take the reader pretty far, and am encoding translations for the particularly obscure words using the glossary at the end of the book. This is adding a lot of encoding time, but should be cool if I can figure out how to make the translations appear on mouseover. (If I can’t figure out, there’s always Ethan to beg for help, but if it can be done with XSLT/CSS, I shouldn’t need to.)

Right. To work.

[Psst… Livejournal readers – just a reminder that if you comment on the feed, I don’t get notified, and at the rate things are going, am unlikely to go back to past posts and check to see whether there are any comments. Instead of clicking on “leave comment,” click the URL for the post, and you’ll be magically transported to a comment interface on Words’ End.]

Technological wonders and peripheral lucidity.

Ethan’s taken geeky anti-vandal measures. Plus, we now have a set of functioning motion-sensor floodlights. Come back, kid. I want you to show your face.

This repeated-senseless-violence thing has been… distracting; I had been unsuccessfully trying to work for two days and instead somehow getting sucked into the WaiterRant archives again and again. But lo, as soon as I sit down to read/annotate some primary sources (instead of writing the second chapter, which is due – oh – at the end of the month), work gets interesting again. Go figure.

Reading and annotating, in this case, is a lot of pattern-searching. All afternoon and evening my peripheral vision has been crazy-sensitive. I wonder if the two are related.

repeating work patterns.

Work on the thesis is being done in spurts. Partly of necessity: I’ve managed to schedule myself for five out-of-town events, in four trips, all within the same two months. Plus there’s a possibility of getting to spend time with the Nephew, who is turning into an excellent if willful little person, and while I like having him over, I’ve discovered that zero work gets done when he’s around. I suspect it’d be different if we lived closer together, but so it goes.

Anyway, my mental pattern with regard to thesis work has been repeating – rather predictably so; this pattern has existed since long before Roland. It goes something like this:

Before the work period starts: attitude cavalier, anxiety far at bay. Usually, during this time things are happening that make me feel good – conferences, family time, just-breaks with good books.

First day of work period: attitude of “ok, here I am buckling down.” Permitting myself to spend this one day Organizing, which never takes just a day, so the day almost inevitably ends in a vague state of many things accomplished but not enough, damnit.

Second day: overwhelmed and in denial. Repeat mantras of the “I’m smart enough and diligent enough to do this in time – but it won’t happen if I keep succumbing to the anxiety and denial, for they evilly drain energy, confidence and time” sort. Keep having to remind myself that I love this stuff (and I do, it’s the time pressure that’s a bitch to deal with).

From this second day on, if I manage to get myself to start working sometime before 10, life is good. If I don’t, I lose days to self-loathing, or thought patterns less dramatic but just as draining.

The hardest thing is not knowing how long this thesis will take, or how much work it will be. I’ve set myself a hard limit – graduate next spring – but what if I don’t get the work done? If I could see the steps clearly, it would be easier to work. As it stands, it’s hard to even know which large swathes of work will turn out to be useless for the current purposes. There’s no way I can do justice to the Roland corpus in the course of this dissertation; defining its limits in a field of material that I don’t know that well (there’s SO MUCH of it!) seems like a futile exercise.

Outlines don’t help, either. They take so much time to make, and then I have to change them a million times over. My working outline helps me organize whatever it is I want to do next, I guess. But since it isn’t representative of the final thesis structure (as I discovered rewriting chapter the first), it’s not an indicator of how far along I am.

These are some of the things that make thesis writing hard – I’ve read and heard this from many sources. The resultant anxiety is a pest, and I resent it for that. Go. Shoo!

Sunday, rainy Sunday.

As I just wrote on IM, “You know you’re an academic when, case #254: you’re STUCK IN YOUR OFFICE on a SUNDAY because the door latch is broken.” Totally serious. I can’t even get to my printout! Aaaaaaiiie!

Someone from Facilities is supposedly on their way over. In the meantime, an update.

Elliott, the car I’d had for eight years, has bit it. A stupid accident of the sort that… you just stand there and laugh. Who woulda known that going at ten miles per hour could crumple up the hood and front to the point where the car would be pronounced totaled?

Well, it happened. Nobody was hurt, thank goodness. They’ve taken the car away. We have a rental, and have purchased another car – although we won’t have it for a few more days. A Honda Fit. It’s supremely odd to have bought a new-new car, but given available options and our needs, this was the prudent thing to do.

I’m full of nervous energy. The project is two months and a bit away from conclusion. There are at least three papers to write before then, and it would be good if they didn’t suck. And then the dissertation, which I cannot WAIT for, but which will undoubtedly bring procrastination demons with it. It’s like the boss level in a video game: slay the procrastination demons (who look suspiciously like those wraith guys from Mordor), get to the golden cup – or the degree, as it happens.

It’ll All Be Fine. Now, if only my brain could turn into a brain again… *pokes the mushy puddle with a stick*

*mushy puddle EATS the stick*

Ack.

Hey, you know what I’ve discovered? Stephen King isn’t all that bad. I have practically swallowed up the first two books of the Dark Tower series, which is not so much horror as dark-fantasy-meets-pulp. Its protagonist is a gunslinger named Roland. I’m happy to report that yes, he does in fact have enough qualities to be That Roland, and so reading King is officially dissertation work. iWin!

Now I am freed by way of Facilities’ help over the phone. Time to go where the internet isn’t, and make another attempt at writing a certain proposal.

current mood: annoyed.

It really, really gets to me when I spend untold hours on a fellowship application, submit it, receive a personal e-mail by way of receipt, even… and then get rejected and do not hear about it. Honestly, considering the number of things I apply for, I expect to get mostly rejections. But why keep me stringing along? You want to reject me, fine; I applaud the many people who’re better suited to your venture. But do let me know, and preferably in a timely manner, so that I can go on with my life. How hard can it be?!

In academe, I cannot assume that silence equals rejection; things take forever, deadlines are hopeful at best and arbitrary as a matter of fact, people have too many things to do and continually overcommit. So I cannot take silence for an automatic no: they may just be running late. So it sits on my plate, for no reason at all, and I play the “should I e-mail them? should I wait some more?” game. Worse: weeks after the supposed notification date, I e-mail the authorities in question and get a form letter in response. For goodness’ sake! If you have a form letter, why in the world didn’t you send it to me before??

You wouldn’t know it from this post, but I’ve had an excellent day. Roland^HT is coming together; we got haircuts and they are great, and for all of the stress that accompanies the week preceding a big event, it’s also by degrees easier to work long hours: the adrenaline keeps me going. I honestly wish I could call that up whenever I wanted, and get a lot of work done in a haze of sleepless, delirious joy.

the invisible blogger dissertates.

While, it might seem, being a female weblogger may be a frustrating, futile affair, I’m not discouraged from posting. What I am discouraged by, at the moment, is the weight of the Thesis. It is seeping into my bones, massive and menacing, as expected around this time. I am yet a year and a half away from graduation (best-case scenario), but there’s a lot to do, and it is monumentally difficult to take a project of this magnitude one step at a time.

Last year, I took a look at Joan Bolker’s Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis. Of course, she isn’t proposing that the “you”-subject of the book only work for fifteen minutes each day. She is, however, proposing that I make myself do fifteen minutes of good, solid work, and then see where that leads me. There’s more, of course – a book’s worth of decent advice, actually – but this is the gist. If things just aren’t productive on a given day, that’s okay. Squeeze out the fifteen minutes and go on with life, doing things that you feel can be accomplished at this moment when your brain just isn’t in the right frame of mind to dissertate.

It takes me a while to get into a good working groove on Roland. [Once|If] I do, several more good hours are likely to follow; but the getting into it part is difficult. So I’m adopting Bolker’s advice, with modifications. A two-and-a-half-hour stretch set aside, in which I can only work on thesis. If thesis isn’t going, I’ll participate in activities that require no external input (thinking, meditation, yoga) and produce no external output (no blogging or cooking or cleaning, for example).

Part of me wonders whether this will affect my personality, as it is expressed in relating to other people. Will I become less likely to seek others’ company? More likely to go for long walks? More or less articulate about the subject of my thesis, let alone other important topics? Hm.

On a different note entirely, there are no official provisions for collaborating with others on the subject of one’s dissertation, in the humanities. Or are there? Am I just not seeing guidelines where some actually exist? Perhaps I will contact the Graduate Council again, and formally arrange with them for technical collaboration with a colleague. So that there aren’t Issues later.

Of course, if said colleague releases some code as open-source (or a Creative Commons-type license), then even a formal permission shouldn’t be necessary.

Well.

Looks like I passed my prelims.

I’m now ABD - All But Dissertation.

Wicked!

T minus one week

My prelim is in one week and two hours. There’s a symmetry to this one-two deal that makes me happy. Also, I’ve got an article due on the 30th. Consequently, I have been thinking Very Academic Thoughts. These are some of the things that have been on my mind lately.

Hypertext, the h word, is almost a bad word nowadays. Like Noah did, I went back to Theodor Nelson’s definition. “Let me introduce the word ‘hypertext’ to mean a body of written and pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper. [and then in a footnote:] The sense of ‘hyper-’ used here connotes extension and generality: cf. “hyperspace.” The criterion for this prefix is the inability of these objects to be comprised sensibly into linear media, like the text string, or even media of somewhat higher complexity.” (This is from his talk at the ACM proceedings in 1965.)

Nelson’s done with that definition, it seems, it’s mutated and so has the computer. But we still attempt to find a definition for hypertext, or else to coin better suited words.

I am not saying anything new, but keep coming back to this: the “problem” isn’t with the term, the term’s fine. In defining it, Nelson hit on a quality intrinsic to the human experience. Everything, the world, is a hypertext; this is a scary concept to academics, because it is too vague and imprecise. Still, it’s unproductive to deny this, or to shy away from it. The question shouldn’t be whether a set of data is or is not a hypertext, but rather whether it’s interesting or revealing to represent it as such electronically.

The electronic medium is the most suited one in which to define the Roland corpus, because Roland is a hypertext spanning different media. He is in literature, film, theater, music, painting, drawing, sculpture, stone carvings… I’m probably forgetting something. (Are sculptures and stone carvings distinct, or is it all sculpture?..) Combining them, viewing them through the codified electronic eye acts as an equalizer. Any critical discourse affects the way we view an artifact, and critical discourse of several media which takes place in an altogether different medium fails to skew perspective in favor of one of the constituent corpus media. Am I making any sense, and if so, am I full of nonsense?

In writing the to-be-published article (as opposed to my written prelim, which is more than twice as long and will only be read by my committee), I omitted heuretics entirely. It is the lifeblood of my research, but I omitted it, finding it impossible to explain what’s going on with Roland^HT, put forth some preliminary conclusions and defend the heuretic approach, all in 6000 words or less. Greg Ulmer suggests scholarship as creativity, “a generative experiment: based on a given theory, how might another text be composed?” (Heuretics: The Logic of Invention 5). This feels liberating and right, both in my own research and in my thinking about teaching. (I’ll get to implement the teaching next spring, in “Codex to code: an introduction to humanities computing.”)

This’ll be its own article. But not until after prelim. And the two term papers. And the article. And Electronic Cabaret, at which I am apparently reading. Woot.

Besides academia, I am thinking about the summer. For all its foreseeable (and foreseen) difficulties, it will satisfy my wanderlust like no summer before it… mm, save perhaps 2002. Road trip down to Athens, through Roanoke where we get to stay with a friend I haven’t seen since December. After the conference, on to Huntsville, Alabama, where I’ll meet an exceedingly cool laser physicist MUDfriend whom I’ve never actually met in non-digital space. Then Memphis, the Mississippi river, New Orleans. West to Albuquerque, where Scott and Rachel are young doctors in residency and in love. Then Grand Canyon, and Los Angeles. Two and a half months in LA to do work and be with family, then drive north to Nevada, hang out with thirty thousand community-oriented nutjobs for a while, drive back east through Madison and probably Chicago.

In-between, learn perl, encode a 700-page text, digitize all my primary Roland sources.

I can’t wait ’til summer.

Oh, also, I’m thinking of applying for a Fulbright, and to that end am looking for experienced guidance wrt the application process.

License plate

Seen on a station wagon today:

ABD

(y’think it was a hint?…)

work ethic

Four weeks from today, prelim. If I pass it, I’ll be ABD. I should be nervous, twitchy, frantically studying, and I’m not.

There is a lot of work to do, but mostly it isn’t overwhelming. There are times, hours or days at a time, when I find myself unable to work, and put aside books and computer in favor of other activities. I’ve enough experience with my own work habits to know that if the time ahead doesn’t feel productive, it won’t be; so there’s no use in trying. So I read books, see my friends, then dive in again.

The question is always there in the back of my head: is this wrong? Am I overly cocksure, setting myself up for failure? Is this feeling of “there’s only so much I can learn in a given time period” an excuse to not push myself?

Perhaps it is unsettling that this research is not as difficult as the research I did in the Italian Studies track. Yet, I am learning more now. Perhaps it isn’t as difficult because I seem to have found my Subject. But there are no guidelines, except for what my committee and I have come up with. There is no trial by fire, no hated rite of passage, only work.

I push, when I need to. (It gets me in trouble sometimes, this toeing of the dead-line.) I sleep and work at odd hours. I navel-gaze in a public forum (this one) and then go back to work. The hard part is, work is never certain. There is little to compare it to, there are few standards. But then I shrug, and decide again and again that I am willing to make a fool of myself.