![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Today is quite the perfect day for ordering books online while listening to jazz and Travis, and sipping tea.
I've been rather remarkably lazy of late; I'd like to say that I have sacrificed my academic life for my social life, but I'm not sure that's an accurate description at all (although, man, my house has been busy this past week). I think it's more a sense of wanting to distance myself from this past academic year, which has not been as good as I would have hoped, and is leaving me despairing a bit over whether or not this is what I want to do. The despair is rather augmented by the fact that I don't know what else I could be - I'm not sure what else I can deal with.
I think part of what I'm feeling is a reaction to a sequence in the service at church last Sunday asking, simply, "What are you doing to make the world a better place?" And I can't help feeling that as an academic, the answer is not much. Who are you really affecting? Who are you touching, as an academic? And that's my problem: I don't have an answer for that question, and I'd like one.
I think that's part of the reason I can't deal with my dissertation right now; it's too strange and feels a little bit pointless. I think I need an angle, a way to deal with it so it becomes relevant and more than just musings on the subject of the post-modern. Or, of course, it could be just laziness.
More than anything, though, I want to be excited about my degree again - or more than that, I want to be excited about reading again. Which, hopefully, the books I've bought today will help with (Greetings from Bury Park, a memoir in Springsteen lyrics; How They Met, short stories by David Levithan; The Common Reader, literary essays by Virginia Woolf and The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World, young adult fantasy by EL Konigsburg). I hope, anyway.
I've been rather remarkably lazy of late; I'd like to say that I have sacrificed my academic life for my social life, but I'm not sure that's an accurate description at all (although, man, my house has been busy this past week). I think it's more a sense of wanting to distance myself from this past academic year, which has not been as good as I would have hoped, and is leaving me despairing a bit over whether or not this is what I want to do. The despair is rather augmented by the fact that I don't know what else I could be - I'm not sure what else I can deal with.
I think part of what I'm feeling is a reaction to a sequence in the service at church last Sunday asking, simply, "What are you doing to make the world a better place?" And I can't help feeling that as an academic, the answer is not much. Who are you really affecting? Who are you touching, as an academic? And that's my problem: I don't have an answer for that question, and I'd like one.
I think that's part of the reason I can't deal with my dissertation right now; it's too strange and feels a little bit pointless. I think I need an angle, a way to deal with it so it becomes relevant and more than just musings on the subject of the post-modern. Or, of course, it could be just laziness.
More than anything, though, I want to be excited about my degree again - or more than that, I want to be excited about reading again. Which, hopefully, the books I've bought today will help with (Greetings from Bury Park, a memoir in Springsteen lyrics; How They Met, short stories by David Levithan; The Common Reader, literary essays by Virginia Woolf and The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World, young adult fantasy by EL Konigsburg). I hope, anyway.
