Binge working

I am going to have a headache tomorrow. I began planning my headache on Monday and cleared it with my boss this afternoon. I am going to have a headache and I am going to stay home from work. I have a thesis to write.

I have a thesis to write and I have discovered that I get the most accomplished when I binge work, when I spend all day at the computer, stoping only for regular jolts of caffieine (yes, I plan to be back on the sauce tomorrow) and an hour break for All My Childern at noon. I wrote the bulk of the rough draft of my thesis in two days by staying home and doing nothing but writing, so I am hoping to accomplish as much on making corrections to my rough draft as I did when I wrote it the first time. The good news is that my advisor has seen the draft, didn't hate it and didn't give me a lot of areas that need correction. The bad news is that I have to have the rough draft rewritten by next week so I can give him time to review it before our next appointment.

I really want to finish grad school by December and it seems like that is a realistic aspiration at this point. I am sick of grad school. I am sick of theories. I am sick of other grad students, who engage in intellectual dick measuring contests where the winner is decided by who can drop the most obsure academic reference into a normal conversation (Me: "Hi, how are you?" Them: "Fine, though as Professor McSnottypants noted in 1979 in his groundbreaking work on female conversational dynamics, I'm just socialized to respond with a fine in the context of an informal conversation" Me: "Shut up"). I shouldn't be so grouchy. I am not actually in classes any more, so I hardly run into other grad students anymore, but the annoyance lingers from other semesters. Most of my crankyness about this process probably has more to do with my procrastination on writing and less to do with grad school itself, but blaming/mocking/complaining about other people is, for me, vastly more entertaining that thinking about the ways that I could have made this a better experience for myself.

I don't regret grad school, though I sometimes can't remember why it seemed like something that I had to do, other than to try to prove in some sort of official way that I'm smart. The secret is, however, that going to grad school doesn't prove that you are smart, it just proves that you did well enough to get in. Finishing grad school isn't a sign of genius either, it just means you stuck it out and you jumped through the neccessary hoops. There are, of course, many smart folks in grad school and with their ph.d's but they'd be smart even if they didn't have a disseratation sitting on the shelf somewhere.