Today I met with my lovely supervisor, and as expected I need coherence. I need to make decisions about purpose in order to structure effectively. Some people find structure easy, when it comes to a poem, I can do this. I can feel the need to metre my feet, but the discipline of structure within chapters is so abstract for me, that I need to develop a system.
In poetry my ideas cascade and then I slowly shape, and reshape. I let the words collapse around me, and I pick them up, turn them around, and they begin to form. The words and the ideas are conjoined, one is born from the other, and I am never quite sure which way around this is.
So now, I need to develop the discipline of a social scientist. With headings, and subheadings, and if I imagine these as branches, and allow the words to bud and grow, then maybe they may bloom? Or maybe I need to just abandon my words for a little while, and re structure my brain to think in tracks of sequential thoughts? I need whalebones, a corset for the mind. I struggle to wear matching socks, how can I ever think in matching thoughts?
A PhD is rather a grown up way of thinking for someone who has a scattered head.
So my lovely, and clever supervisor has suggested a duel write; a document for the concrete, and a simultaneous one for the random, abstracts which always arrive whenever I go near words. That really is the best idea I have heard all week, so this week I will give it a go. Who knows I might actually manage to maintain the 'purpose' for a full page...
Friday, 7 February 2014
Thursday, 6 February 2014
Flops and fish cakes...
Flop.
I am in a complete flop.
Number four child is walking across the room singing, no more wawwwwing. Think Clint Eastwood and Western movie soundtracks...wa, wa, wa, wa, waaaaaaaa. Waa, waa, waaaaaaaaa.
Child number six is running back and forward, trying desperately to find somewhere to hide, and has now crashed under child number one's shirt. Child number one is technically an adult, although anyone listening to him fuss about her feet in his ribs would dispute that.
Child number five is pretending to be a cushion, hoping his dad won't notice he is still clicking on the laptop past his allocated time.
Number three has commandeered the dining room table for her art project. Well, to doodle on a pad while singing out of key to the tunes plugged into her head.
Number two is currently at his band's 'practice'. He may crash in at any moment, and stagger like Frankenstein with guitar slung across his back, and amp dragging him floor-wards.
The cat is prostrate across the living room rug obliviously.
The man who helped me produce the cacophony of minions in the first place, is now also producing food. Fish cakes, one of their favourites.
While I sigh, and think in my flop, that today was a turning point kind of a day. Today we found out that the cooking man will not actually be dying of a brain tumour any time soon.
Thank God because my fish cakes are crap.
I am in a complete flop.
Number four child is walking across the room singing, no more wawwwwing. Think Clint Eastwood and Western movie soundtracks...wa, wa, wa, wa, waaaaaaaa. Waa, waa, waaaaaaaaa.
Child number six is running back and forward, trying desperately to find somewhere to hide, and has now crashed under child number one's shirt. Child number one is technically an adult, although anyone listening to him fuss about her feet in his ribs would dispute that.
Child number five is pretending to be a cushion, hoping his dad won't notice he is still clicking on the laptop past his allocated time.
Number three has commandeered the dining room table for her art project. Well, to doodle on a pad while singing out of key to the tunes plugged into her head.
Number two is currently at his band's 'practice'. He may crash in at any moment, and stagger like Frankenstein with guitar slung across his back, and amp dragging him floor-wards.
The cat is prostrate across the living room rug obliviously.
The man who helped me produce the cacophony of minions in the first place, is now also producing food. Fish cakes, one of their favourites.
While I sigh, and think in my flop, that today was a turning point kind of a day. Today we found out that the cooking man will not actually be dying of a brain tumour any time soon.
Thank God because my fish cakes are crap.
Tuesday, 4 February 2014
Teen bodies and angst fuelled mothers
I have just read an article about teen body awareness, in fact I have read many such articles in the last month. Not because I am a teen; far from it. But because my eldest daughter is. And just as I researched and obsessed about almost every stage of child development, I find myself also meticulously studying this element of child development too. However, while 'toilet training', or 'speech development' were almost abstract concepts, this creeping towards adult issues which are pertinent to the female psyche takes on a whole new dimension. I want to understand how the world is being presented to her, but why? So I can micromanage her development? So I can protect her, steer her, and guide her towards my view of a confident being? Or because I am her Mother, and I just want her to grow up to be as happy, content and fulfilled as she can be?
But I do wonder how this media fuelled generation, a youth fed a diet of confused, juxtaposed messages can ever get to the point where they feel 'worthy'. In a society where even a 'zit' - that natural phenomenon and hormone fuelled bi-product - is portrayed as a ghastly abhorrence to be fought mercilessly, where every pore, blemish, strand of hair, limb, torso is marketised and analysed. How can any young person ever develop a sense that they are quite perfectly beautiful, just as they are?
But I do wonder how this media fuelled generation, a youth fed a diet of confused, juxtaposed messages can ever get to the point where they feel 'worthy'. In a society where even a 'zit' - that natural phenomenon and hormone fuelled bi-product - is portrayed as a ghastly abhorrence to be fought mercilessly, where every pore, blemish, strand of hair, limb, torso is marketised and analysed. How can any young person ever develop a sense that they are quite perfectly beautiful, just as they are?
Policy and procrastination
Seems another large 'gap' has appeared between postings. I truly am flaky.
My meeting has just been cancelled, normally I would do something productively student facing. But today, I feel a little off kilter, like my internal gyroscope is rotating out of sync. So I have just been using that time by reading, 'Stalking Ableism: Using Disability to Expose 'Abled' Narcissism by Fiona Kumari Campbell. Usually at this point, I would jot down some thoughts. I have piles of these, scattered like a gust of withered leaves in autumn. My hope is that like the detritus of decomposing leaves, the seemingly useless, will eventually create food and growth. I acknowledge that this is essential. I know this as fact. Yet, I don't actually seem to believe that at the moment. Like a failed Catholic, I know the mantra, mouth the word of the prayers, but that core of faith is a vast and empty space.
On Friday, I will attend confession, and will submit to the Hail Marys that my lovely supervisor gives. She will feed me the sermon, the one I regularly preach to students, about the phases of learning, about the need to read, read and read some more, about the need to get stuff on paper. The need to create a plan, to write to this plan, to give the scattered thoughts shape and form...she will explain how research is filled, blighted even, by these pot-holes. That along the journey we stumble, or we meander off course, and that at times returning to the discarded leaves is essential. And I will nod and agree, and knuckle down. I will rewrite the shoddy mess that occurred last week, and I will turn that narrative meander through a pile of mismatched leaves into some coherent thought. I know this, I don't believe it, but I know it.
But today, reading Campbell's article again, I almost realised why I have this feeling of 'stuckness'. The decomposition has almost formed into an elusive, and frail skeleton of thought.
I am writing about 'policy'. Interesting you all cry! Yet, not matter how I recount these historical, and sometimes contemporary events, it never seems quite right, it stays narrative. It feels like a compression, as if I am squeezing chunks through a tin can squasher. There is too much to say, and so I try and rush, and squash and squeeze...yet I feel no interest in expanding. I know there are uncited chunks (horror, shock, gasp). I know I have omitted , I know I have made vast, gloriously sweeping statements. I know I have made points, not arguments. I have laboured this for the last two months, and all I have produced is 5,500 badly written words. If it was an undergraduate assignment, I would be struggling to scrape a pass. And if you asked me about these policies, I could tell you precisely nothing.
Who knows, by Friday, it may even have turned into words.
Maybe by Friday it will have digested into something actually worth saying?
My meeting has just been cancelled, normally I would do something productively student facing. But today, I feel a little off kilter, like my internal gyroscope is rotating out of sync. So I have just been using that time by reading, 'Stalking Ableism: Using Disability to Expose 'Abled' Narcissism by Fiona Kumari Campbell. Usually at this point, I would jot down some thoughts. I have piles of these, scattered like a gust of withered leaves in autumn. My hope is that like the detritus of decomposing leaves, the seemingly useless, will eventually create food and growth. I acknowledge that this is essential. I know this as fact. Yet, I don't actually seem to believe that at the moment. Like a failed Catholic, I know the mantra, mouth the word of the prayers, but that core of faith is a vast and empty space.
On Friday, I will attend confession, and will submit to the Hail Marys that my lovely supervisor gives. She will feed me the sermon, the one I regularly preach to students, about the phases of learning, about the need to read, read and read some more, about the need to get stuff on paper. The need to create a plan, to write to this plan, to give the scattered thoughts shape and form...she will explain how research is filled, blighted even, by these pot-holes. That along the journey we stumble, or we meander off course, and that at times returning to the discarded leaves is essential. And I will nod and agree, and knuckle down. I will rewrite the shoddy mess that occurred last week, and I will turn that narrative meander through a pile of mismatched leaves into some coherent thought. I know this, I don't believe it, but I know it.
But today, reading Campbell's article again, I almost realised why I have this feeling of 'stuckness'. The decomposition has almost formed into an elusive, and frail skeleton of thought.
I am writing about 'policy'. Interesting you all cry! Yet, not matter how I recount these historical, and sometimes contemporary events, it never seems quite right, it stays narrative. It feels like a compression, as if I am squeezing chunks through a tin can squasher. There is too much to say, and so I try and rush, and squash and squeeze...yet I feel no interest in expanding. I know there are uncited chunks (horror, shock, gasp). I know I have omitted , I know I have made vast, gloriously sweeping statements. I know I have made points, not arguments. I have laboured this for the last two months, and all I have produced is 5,500 badly written words. If it was an undergraduate assignment, I would be struggling to scrape a pass. And if you asked me about these policies, I could tell you precisely nothing.
Who knows, by Friday, it may even have turned into words.
Maybe by Friday it will have digested into something actually worth saying?
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