Feel So Bad...
Nov. 11th, 2008 09:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fersakynWell, I have had a pretty terrible last few weeks. I was rear-ended the last Sunday of October, and the guy's insurance company played phone-tag with me for a week before letting me know that the guy's insurance policy expired just before he hit me!
My body's in disrepair along with my no-longer shiny new car. The slight whiplash effect has resulted in the right side of my upper body feeling knotted and sore and pretty much horrible for more than a week now. It also means that I haven't been sleeping very well since my body hurts.
Besides those sticky issues, I had a horrific "talk" with a professor on my dissertation committee. It was more like an hour-long berating. And, as I tell other people when I recount what happened, it's not that I disagree with her points or criticism. I just felt brutalized by the way that she said it. It got waaaay too personal. Instead of being constructive with "here, you should think of x, y, and z when you revise," it was more like "what the hell were you thinking writing this sh*t you call your dissertation," etc. I walked away from the meeting in tears and thinking "I never want to make ANYONE feel the way that she just made me feel." It was that bad.
So, I'm (re)reading the books that she mentioned during the "talk," but feeling rather confused and lost. One of the books she wrote, by the way. She has a very interdisciplinary, Foucauldian view of "look at how the disciplines are all artificial and constructed," blah, blah. Again, not that I disagree with her, but I'm working very much INSIDE my discipline of English literary studies. Am I supposed to interrogate the discipline as I analyze the books and poetry I chose to discuss??? I hadn't thought that it was a requirement, but she seems to think that it's fundamental and so I'm an idiot for not realizing that. So confused...
Hopefully, a meeting next week with the chair of my dissertation committee will clear things up. She could agree with that prof; she could somewhat agree; she could disagree; she could recommend that I get someone else to replace that prof on my committee; she could recommend that I just focus on finishing and not on getting a job in academia; she could recommend that I quit. I have no idea what will happen, but those are some scenarios. I'm not even sure which is most likely. It's all up in the air right now.
Boy, what a way to make a body feel like both a failure and that her life is full of horrible incidents, one on top of the next.
My body's in disrepair along with my no-longer shiny new car. The slight whiplash effect has resulted in the right side of my upper body feeling knotted and sore and pretty much horrible for more than a week now. It also means that I haven't been sleeping very well since my body hurts.
Besides those sticky issues, I had a horrific "talk" with a professor on my dissertation committee. It was more like an hour-long berating. And, as I tell other people when I recount what happened, it's not that I disagree with her points or criticism. I just felt brutalized by the way that she said it. It got waaaay too personal. Instead of being constructive with "here, you should think of x, y, and z when you revise," it was more like "what the hell were you thinking writing this sh*t you call your dissertation," etc. I walked away from the meeting in tears and thinking "I never want to make ANYONE feel the way that she just made me feel." It was that bad.
So, I'm (re)reading the books that she mentioned during the "talk," but feeling rather confused and lost. One of the books she wrote, by the way. She has a very interdisciplinary, Foucauldian view of "look at how the disciplines are all artificial and constructed," blah, blah. Again, not that I disagree with her, but I'm working very much INSIDE my discipline of English literary studies. Am I supposed to interrogate the discipline as I analyze the books and poetry I chose to discuss??? I hadn't thought that it was a requirement, but she seems to think that it's fundamental and so I'm an idiot for not realizing that. So confused...
Hopefully, a meeting next week with the chair of my dissertation committee will clear things up. She could agree with that prof; she could somewhat agree; she could disagree; she could recommend that I get someone else to replace that prof on my committee; she could recommend that I just focus on finishing and not on getting a job in academia; she could recommend that I quit. I have no idea what will happen, but those are some scenarios. I'm not even sure which is most likely. It's all up in the air right now.
Boy, what a way to make a body feel like both a failure and that her life is full of horrible incidents, one on top of the next.
