Evening

Time: 8:35

Today was not awful which is a good start to 2009. Despite my fears about morning, it was not too bad. Umberto only got bitchy at the end. Camille was roaring to go, up, dressed and almost out the door before the rest of us were ready. She had a bag packed with love notes to her friends and the teaching assistant. Piper was even in a good mood...excited about going to school with me. I dropped them off, gave things away, and head to school. I photocopied all the readings for the class I'm teaching, hung out with our totally fab. office manager, and saw our department head who seemed to be saying that I was safe in terms of a job next year (oh please let this be true). Tomorrow, I'll scan everything into a PDF file...luck me. Oh fun. Oh Joy.

But the best thing today was that I finally got the courage to look at my thesis. Yeah the one I actually wrote but felt too demoralized to do anything with. And you know it's not all that bad. It's funny how distance and time can distort things. In my memory, this thesis was horrible. It was disconnected, random, and not thoughtful. I felt discouraged even trying to imagine it could work so I wasted my whole summer trying to come up with something new. I ended up semi ruining my summer in Mexico with this frantic worry. And then I felt paralyzed all last semester...not just in terms of the thesis but about writing in general. I couldn't write here. I couldn't write in a journal. My papers for the semester were last minute, penned in this sort of "must bull through the terror" kind of haste.

And then I vowed this morning that I would spend two hours on my thesis. I made this deal so that I could justify my nap. I delayed...played on crackbook, checked my email, penned unnecessary updates. But finally I opened up that first chapter. And you know it wasn't horrible. I could see that there were areas that would need work but over all it wasn't 41 pages of dreadful writing filled with bad ideas and poorly thought out arguments. In fact, I was kind of proud of the summaries I did on Otto and Durkheim.

I feel...hopeful. Maybe just maybe 2009 will not suck half as bad as 2008.