I defended my thesis this morning—successfully, I might add—which means no more thesis updates. From here on out they will all be book updates, the working title of which I’m still too embarrassed to admit. If you want to know, you’ll have to stalk me through the EWU library system and sneak a look at my soon-to-be-bound thesis.
The defense itself went very well. I never got nervous, which I think actually helped a lot. I felt they asked me good, smart questions, and that I learned as much as I explained. I’ve got a real good idea of where to take the book next, and I feel energized. I graduate on Friday, and then my Master’s degree will be official.
There are two things* that I’m not that good at: socializing and being productive consistently over long periods of time. As my grad school experience comes to an end, however, I’ve really amped up both, and now I’m having to balance the two activities (work and play) and not use one to avoid the other. And yes, I really do use work as an excuse to not do social things that make me nervous**.
I defend my thesis in seven days, graduate in nine, and move in eleven. I’m running out of time, and it only recently hit me that I could have done a lot more with my two years. Only in April did I start a strict six-days-per-week writing schedule (that I’ve kept to save for post-thesis relaxation and rejuvenation) and only about three weeks ago did I start being social on a regular basis (all these friends that I waited a year to meet!). I’m glad I got there in the end, but I can’t help wondering at all the time I missed out on.
I turned in my thesis last week, and since then I’ve gotten another story ready for publishing. I’ve also been out dancing a handful of times. And in between all that, I’ve been reading like mad off my thesis list, packed up well over half the apartment, and even found some time to relax. I don’t know what it is, but once I started balancing better, my days seemed to be longer.
*I’m obviously “not that good” at more than two things
**Nervous as in “meeting new people scares me and is a lot of work” not “I might be making poor life decisions if I’m social tonight”
I started this last year, and I thought the series finale mandated a repeat. If you’re so inclined, download the 2010 Favorite Character bracket. If you fill it out (I might do one pre-finale and another post-finale), post your finale four and ultimate winner here. Also available is a brand new death match bracket, asking the question Who would win in a fight between…?
Enjoy! And happy finale watching!
*EDIT* I only just realized that I should have made a typeable PDF, but I didn’t, so you’ll have to print. I put these together in about ten minutes total, so they don’t showcase my PW design skills, sadly.
I love Third Eye Blind, and after a long hiatus, they released a new album, Ursa Major, in August of 2009. It’s not my favorite of their albums–I’d say that’s a toss up between Blue and Out of the Vein–but it does have one of my favorite songs of theirs: Don’t Believe a Word (which, incidentally, has a kick ass video of black and white stop motion photography).
I’ve got a habit of listening to songs on repeat until I know all the words, and I’ve probably listened to this song a hundred times (and I still can’t get all the words!), including yesterday in my car on the way home from work. And there’s this one line in the song that I just love–but that I feel sort of wrong for loving. Read more…
Well it’s been a crazy month-and-a-half since I last posted. Joel moved back to Michigan, I spent two-and-a-half weeks at home, then came back to WA for my next-to-last quarter at EWU. And it was straight back to work with thesis meetings, a new class (nonfiction workshop), and lots of Willow Springs work.
Sophie trying to escape my clutches in November 2008.
Being home was fantastic. I made friends with Sophie (!). She still barked at me every morning when I came upstairs, but by mid-afternoon she was jumping up on the couch with me. Other than my dog befriending activities, I spent a lot of time relaxing. I think I did five 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzles. I also got hooked on Dollhouse. For Christmas I got so many books I couldn’t bring them all back to WA. And a sweet digital camera that I can’t wait to start using.
Back in Washington, the end is looming. My thesis looks way closer this side of Christmas. In nonfiction workshop I’m facing my fear of writing essays meant to be read by other people. For Willow Springs, we launched our new blog, and it took way more work to have ready than I’d expected, but it’s going fantastically well so far. I post on Mondays, so you should all go check those out. This week I talk about Amazon’s decision to pull all Macmillan books from its site. You can still buy the books, but only through third party sellers.
This isn’t a basketball blog by any means, but I pretty much have to say something right now.
Michigan State is Final Four bound! We’re going to Detroit to take on the UConn Huskies! And every four-year player for Tom Izzo has gone to a final four! Go State!
My original intention was to use this blog to track my progress through my graduate program at Eastern Washington University. However, after my blog was hacked back in October (September?), I had to take it down, not having written one post about my program. With the workload I was carrying (15 graduate credits, a 20-hour-per-week job, and lots and lots of homework), I kept bumping the blog maintenance back until today, over four months later, I finally got around to doing enough maintenance to put it live again, though without any of the original content, which is actually fine with me, since I didn’t have a clear content-related plan before. And woah. Long sentence there.
So anyway, this blog is going to contain posts on things such as my MFA experiences, pieces I’m writing (and trying to publish), books I’m reading (or have read), my reactions to and analysis of popular culture, and probably a few random posts about my two cats. And, when I find the time, I want to work on tweaking and personalizing this WordPress theme. But I’ll be honest; that might take awhile.
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