Why I don't Want to See "Unbroken."

And why don’t I want to see it, you may well ask? I’m not thinking about how the movie was put together—not entirely at any rate—since I have not seen it. I have seen the trailer though, I’ve read some reviews, and I cannot get around how this movie looks like it facilitates white privilege. Let me walk you through my reasoning.

First, a wee bit of background. Based on Laura Hillenbrand’s book of the same name, “Unbroken” chronicles the life of WWII veteran and POW Louis Zamperini. Director Angelina Jolie and co-writers the Coen brothers have billed the movie as a story about “survival,” “resilience,” “redemption.” Regardless of the film’s merits, critics have associated the usual words about WWII with the movie. Manohla Dargis writes that “[Zamperini’s] is one of those stories that has come to define the Greatest Generation.” Although Justin Chang offers us a look at what’s at stake, noting that Ms. Jolie and co. are pushing for a major award, he describes the movie as a “capably stirring, morally unambiguous and classically polished prestige picture about an unusually spirited member of the Greatest Generation who survived a hell beyond anyone's imagination.”

Here’s where things get sticky for me. Despite that African Americans served alongside whites in World War II, the former do not appear to be well represented in “Unbroken.” Indeed, the lone exception that I could find is a “brief glimpse” of Jesse Owens, played by Sierra Leone sprinter Bangalie Keita. If there more references to African Americans in the movie, film reviewers have not mentioned them.

Let me be clear. I am not trivializing either Zamperini’s experience as a WWII veteran and POW survivor or the story that Ms. Jolie and the Coen brothers set out to tell in making this film. And I am aware that the vast majority of Americans who served in WWII were white and that Zamperini was one of the few survivors from the war whose story could be told some 60 years later. But that’s just it: Zamperini and the millions of white Americans who served in WWII don’t have to fight to tell their stories. Their story dominates the picture we have of what WWII was like. Whereas the fact that almost no African Americans are depicted in the movie clearly reflects the fact that, unlike their white counterparts, they do have to fight to be recognized. I’m willing to bet very few white people know that anywhere between 125,000 and 1.2 million African Americans served in WWII or that the Tuskegee Airmen were the first blacks ALLOWED to serve as aviators in the United States armed forces. And despite serving their country and proving their worth in battle, these soldiers were discriminated against at home and in the theatre (Jim Crow laws were in effect until 1965).

I’m well educated, and I’m ashamed to admit I had not heard of the Tuskegee Airmen until today. Which is precisely the point I’m making. I knew the watered down, white version of history everyone knows, not the far more nuanced, far more compelling one. Because I didn't make an effort until now to know it even as I was chaffing at what I was seeing and not seeing in the trailers for “Unbroken.”

If you think I’m exaggerating the problem with black people having to fight to tell their stories or to fight even for the same screen space, let me give you some more examples that came up in my research. For one, when I googled an image search on Bengalie Keita—a picture of him was not provided at the IMDB—I saw some pictures of Keita and other black people but also lots of white people, including Jack OConnell, who plays Zamperini in the film, but also Republican congressmen John Boehner, Taylor Swift, and perhaps most disturbingly, Oscar Pistorius. In contrast, something like 96 percent of the pictures I saw of Jack OConnell were of himself. And not one black person is depicted instead of OConnell.

Moreover, whereas Zamperini’s story has not been questioned to any serious degree, almost immediately upon release the movie “Selma” and the story it tells has been contested by Joseph A. Califano, former Special Assistant for Domestic Affairs under President Lyndon B. Johnson, who wrote an op-ed on the film entitled “The movie ‘Selma’ has a glaring flaw.” In a nutshell, Califano’s beef is that the movie unfairly portrays Johnson and the FBI: “Selma was LBJ’s idea,” Califano writes, “he considered the Voting Rights Act his greatest legislative achievement, he viewed King as an essential partner in getting it enacted—and he didn’t use the FBI to disparage him.” Quite frankly, I’m amazed at Califano’s gall in trying to credit LBJ with organizing the Selma marches. I also guess the fact that the current President of the United States has had to fight every day he has held office to be treated with respect has escaped Califano’s notice. And although I think that’s shitty enough, there are worse examples I could trot out of how blacks have been portrayed for protesting the deaths of Mike Brown, Eric Garner, and countless others. I promise you, few of the words the media has used to describe these people compare favorably to “survival,” “resilience,” or “redemption.” And of course, Mike Brown, Eric Garner, and countless others are dead because they happened to be black. And that’s just the last six months, let alone the last two-hundred some years of systematic, violent discrimination and oppression of the American black community.

In closing, I don’t want to see “Unbroken” not because it might not be a good film but because I don’t think it’s the movie anyone, and especially white people, needs to be seeing right now. We could do with a few more movies about Selma and the civil rights movement (and yeah, I do plan to see the one out now). We could do with a few about the Tuskegee Airmen.

'Tis the Season...For Anti-Multicultural Memes

December is upon us. Many people around the world will gather to remember one tradition or another this month. Most of us are familiar with the main stream ones: Christmas, Hannukah, New Year's Eve. In addition, Mexicans will observe the Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe; Kenyans Jamhuri Day; Shiite Muslims Arba'een or Chehlom, which this year falls on 13 December on the Gregorian Calendar; and many more besides these.

I think most Americans recognize on some level the positive role that multiculturalism has played in shaping the kind of country the United States has become, whether that means enjoying a dish that has transcended ethnic borders (gumbo or jambalaya, anyone!?!) or something deeper. But for some Americans, when confronted with the reality that not everyone wants to be told “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays,” all sense of understanding what a diverse and culturally rich country we live in falls to the ground like the pine needles on last year’s tree.

What’s all the fuss is the constant refrain by holiday well wishers. Can’t I say something nice to a stranger? Why are these people so unfriendly!?!

One popular meme making the rounds on Facebook this year goes, “I don’t understand what the big deal is…If you are Jewish, tell me: Happy Hanukkah. If you are Christian, tell me: Merry Christmas. If you are African American, tell me: Joyous Kwanza. If you don’t prefer those, tell me: Happy Holidays. I will not be offended. I will be thankful that you took the time to say something nice to me.”

Ostensibly, the writer of this meme and those who choose to post it to Facebook may mean well. Whether the sentiment is sincere or not, the meme at least attempts to include several cultural traditions. But the underlying message, whether intentional or not, is that people are too sensitive and that political correctness has hijacked the reasons for the seasons, as it were. The writer also implies that, since they aren't the type to get easily offended by some kind of holiday wish, you shouldn't be offended either when they wish you Merry Christmas or whatever. More on this last point later.

So here are some of the problems with telling someone you don’t know anything about, “Hey, I’m cool with however you choose to celebrate this time of year. Don’t be afraid to tell me! I welcome diverse holiday greetings!”

I’ll start with the most obvious issue: not everyone celebrates one of the three traditions the meme names. I’m not expecting an all-inclusive list of traditions here either. That’s not even the point. Rather, the meme makes several huge assumptions about the cultures it mentions and even a few about those it doesn't. Most African Americans don’t celebrate Kwanza, for instance. Not every black person you meet is necessarily African American, for that matter. Likewise, not everyone chooses to celebrate anything or follow each and every custom of a particular holiday.

This leads me to problem number two: not everyone on the planet may wish to give you any kind of holiday greeting. There may be any number of reasons for this that you haven’t thought of. I’ll choose atheists for my example, partly because I’m an atheist and partly because I can readily illustrate what I'm talking about.

What would you expect me to say if I happened to meet you on 25 December? Happy-I-Don’t-Believe-What-You-Believe-Day? I’m not going to lie and pretend that I share your views, so what could I say that wouldn't sound false or weird or rude? If someone wishes me Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays, I don’t take offense, but I also usually say “Thank You” and leave it at that. That answer is not at all unfriendly, and it shows that I understand your views are different than mine. But I've received lots of funny looks when I've said this, as if saying thanks is confusing. And of course not one of these confused people bothered to ask me what I believe.

My point is, if you really respect that everyone on the planet is as an individual with their own life story and history, you respect that no harm is meant just because that person chooses not to greet you or respond in the exact way that you would like.

So, to return to the very first words in this meme, when you tell someone that you don't understand what the fuss is about, you're telling them that you're not interested in their point of view. You're saying that, because you personally don't see a problem, then a problem must not exist, that the person is making it up, that they are overreacting or being overly sensitive.

There are two huge, interrelated problems with this kind of thinking: 1) you take away another person's right to tell their story (or even not tell it); 2) you rob yourself of an opportunity to learn something about someone different than you. Sometimes these differences are small, subtle, not easy to see. But that does not make them unimportant. You probably grasp the fact that electrons exist even though you cannot see them without the aid of precision instruments. But they turn out to be one of the fundamental building blocks of the universe. In much the same way, differences are a fundamental part of what makes each of us human.

If you truly embrace multiculturalism and respect what other people may believe or not believe, you don't go around shouting, "I'm open to different points of view! And Merry Christmas!" That attitude isn't about other people and how they might feel. It's about you. You get to know them. That starts with saying hello, but mostly you stop talking and listen to what they have to say. And you respect that they may not want to talk to you. That doesn't make anyone good or bad. It makes us real people.

Mapping Close Readings

Today was somewhat off of my usual routine. A good friend needed a lift to and from a Doctor’s appointment. I don’t begrudge her this, of course, and I knew about the appointment a day in advance, so I was able to reschedule my day accordingly. I also brought work with me and got a bit done while I was waiting. Calling today hectic or something of that nature would be misleading and unfair. But I do feel like it was rather packed. In addition to helping my friend, I’ve entered another publishing cycle at my job and have been editing news items. All this is to say that tonight’s entry is going to be a relatively short one.

Over all, I think this has been a fairly productive week up to this point, although I’m not certain how much I will be able to get done tomorrow, since I have plans for the evening that are going to require some preparation during the day. But certainly I’ve accomplished more over the last four days than I did all of last week and feel good about that. I’ve been spending most of my time the last several days writing zero drafts of what I think the chapter I am working on is going to be about (and I’ve tentatively decided it’s going to be a full blown chapter rather than part of one) and highlighting key ideas in all of the close readings I have done thus far. I had already done this one way by bolding items that I thought were thought provoking. Now I’m using colored highlighters in order to categorize the information into overarching topics and subtopics.

Deciding on how to highlight my close readings offered me a somewhat challenging task. It was difficult at first to know how I wanted to arrange the information. I only have five colors to choose from, so I needed to decide on rather broad topics. The three most closely related topics are ‘the conqueror’, the ‘conquered’, and ‘translation / theoretical concerns’. I chose red (for the aggressors!), blue, and orange for these respectively. I’ve also chosen yellow as a sort of hodge podge color for items I’m not sure how to categorize, as they could fall into one or several of these three categories, or none. Lastly, green is for ‘dialogue’, which I think ended up being one of the more useful tangents I repeatedly came back to in my close readings.

Something rather interesting has been happening as I’ve highlighted the already highlighted material from my close readings in color. I’ve seen that many of my sentences are organized in terms of several of the topics I have chosen. A sentence can begin by mentioning the conquerors, for instance, which I highlight in red. But it can end with discussion of translation (orange) and /or the conquered (blue). Instead of marking sentences in one color, I am marking them in several, as best I can, to reflect these distinct references. And what is emerging from this is a kind of map of the dialogue that seems to be going on between the way I think of the conquerors (mostly but not only Arthur and his forces) and the conquered ‘in translation’. Very often I’ll have a sentence where orange mediates between red and blue (or vice versa), so that I can see a definite pattern of thought in many of the paragraphs I’ve written.

Admittedly, the patterns that are emerging in my writing have a lot to do with the way I have decided to utilize the color choices available to me. In a very real sense, these patterns have been predetermined by me. Nonetheless, I find seeing a visual representation of how I have approached the topics I have been wrestling with extremely exciting and thought provoking. And I am gathering valuable information in a very quick way. Even if I decide that this arrangement does not make much sense later on, for instance, I have still cut down on a lot of the guess work at the beginning of the more careful drafting process rather than later. And I can more readily visualize how other topics like dialogue feed into my ideas about the conquerors, translation or whatever, which is important to think about as I attempt to put all of this information into a more less cohesive narrative.

Performing the Dissertation Process, or Dancing with the Texts

I’m starting tonight’s entry with a digression. But I promise that it fits with what I want to write about.

I’ve been watching the UK version of ‘Being Human’ (there’s an American version as well, based on the earlier UK series). It’s about a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost who live together and are giving ‘normal’ life a go. It is easily one of the darkest programs I have ever seen. And what makes it so dark most of the time isn’t the fact that they are all something other than ‘human’, whatever that means. Rather, it’s the things the show tells us about how humans would react to these folks if they existed that is truly uncomfortable.

I bring this program up because all of the main characters must constantly perform being human. One of the characters in particular, the Werewolf named George, has a lot of difficulty performing, especially when it comes to his relationships with women. Let me be clear before continuing. George’s approach is pretty horrible, and the difficulty isn’t the women themselves but his belief that he must perform the role of the aggressive man who gets the girl. George is by his nature submissive. He can be kind, thoughtful, sensitive, but he is just as often narcissistic and hateful, perhaps even more so. He has a violent streak that cannot be explained by his lycanthropy. And he hates what he doesn’t understand, which includes not just women but himself. In fact, having written this about George, I’m not certain why I continue to watch the show. If I had to guess, I’d say there is something compelling and realistic about the dark side of all of these characters. Humanity really isn’t very pleasant when put in stressful situations, a point that George makes on one episode as he is consoling the ghost Annie. In addition, each of the main characters, even George, is trying to be something 'better', though they all continue to fail spectacularly.

George’s fixation on performance has had me thinking about how I perform my own life. I decided to explore this in my morning writing session. I won’t go into all of the various ways I think I perform on a daily basis here. But I do want to write a little bit about how I think I have been performing my dissertation process up to this point. I was thinking if it would be possible not to perform as I attempt to shape my close readings into a chapter. And the truth is that I find it very difficult not to do so. The particular way I have decided to go about writing my dissertation-- training myself to write every day, to not worry about how much I’ve written, to stop thinking of what I’ve written as ‘good’ or ‘bad’--is very much a performance, though one that is markedly different from the type of performance I had adopted for most of my academic life. But I also don’t think this type of performance itself is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. And it has the advantage that I am letting the material I’ve read direct the kind of performance I’m giving. I’m not going to say that makes the performance more 'organic' or something like that, since the point of all this is to radically break from the narrative of what I have thought a dissertation should or shouldn’t be. But I do think this approach leaves the performance open ended. It allows me to continuously ask questions and accept that many of the questions do not have answers (or that they have more than one) rather than pigeon whole myself into something that feels like a 'lack' or an 'absence'.

I think imagining the dissertation process this way may help to alleviate some of the pressure and anxiety I have been feeling lately. If I feel that I am replacing one kind of performance with another, then at least this type of performance entails having a dialogue with my texts rather than giving a monologue about them in which I force some kind of preset ideas and attitudes onto them. It’s a kind of dance in which the texts lead me just as much as I lead them. It centers on both myself and the texts as partners working together rather than subordinating one partner to the other.

The Line Must Be Drawn Here

Today I finally finished reviewing everything I had written in that three week period of close readings. Despite knowing that last week put me behind by quite a bit, I can’t help feeling as though that stage of this process took far longer than it should have. Part of why it took so long could be that I did more than simply read entries each day. I sifted through what I thought was usable now and what could be used later or abandoned altogether. I looked for patterns and repetitions of key terms and phrases and highlighted passages. I asked myself additional questions about what I had written: does this make sense?; Do I still think this is valid?; and so on. Having started with something like thirty or thirty‑five single‑spaced pages I now have forty‑one, which means I’ve added quite a bit of new material, since I am not using everything I initially wrote. So I have certainly made progress. I have not been idle. At the same time, however, I can remember reading at least one hundred pages of material on a daily basis when I was still in course work. To have not even gotten that far in nearly three weeks feels very slow in comparison. And yet, I’m not sure how much more I could have done each day. The work isn’t quite the same as it was while I was taking courses. If I was reading one hundred pages a day, it was not all from the same book. It was not even all for the same course. Writing a dissertation, of course, is far more focused. Though I have attempted to categorize some of the topics and subtopics that have cropped up in my writing, everything still boils down to one essential thought: how the practice of translation circulates in the discourses of conquest and domination that pervade the texts I am working with. And it turns out that this one thought covers a lot of discursive space. It informs a host of peoples and ways of thinking about the peoples that inhabit this text, including ethnicity--itself a very complicated issue, social class--perhaps less complicated than ethnicity but still complex, clergy, and so on. About the only way of thinking about people that appears to be mostly (but not entirely) absent from my three texts is gender, since my writers are not all that interested in women. But that appearance is misleading, since the very lack of discussion of women in these texts tells us something important about their translators (not surprisingly all three are men), their audiences, and the way that the issues that arise in their translations are constructed. Indeed, women are so marginalized, so underrepresented in these texts that a study of the roles they are assigned on the rare occasions when they do show up would perhaps present us with the most accurate picture of how the practice of translation works. At least in my experience, it has been easiest for me to see what is going on in my texts when I am faced with that which seems most alien to the discourses that have been manufactured and maintained during the period of history in which I am working.

Everything I’ve just written--and I took my time writing it--feels rather convoluted. One reason for that may be because I am attempting to discuss the last three weeks of review in very broad strokes. Another may be that I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write about this evening, and I’m not quite comfortable with where this entry has been leading me, by which I mean I don’t feel as though I am entirely in control of its direction. But I think the biggest reason for this is that I can see that my interests in the practice of translation are rather scattered. Which topics and subtopics am I going to write about? I've come up with least twenty and probably a good deal more than that, though many of them are related to one another. Which topics are most important to me? Which am I going to get the most mileage out of? And should I be thinking in these terms? Perhaps those topics that will prove most fruitful are also those that are going to require the most extra research and work, so much so that I would not be able to finish in time? October is nearly gone now, and I feel a little bit panicky despite having made good progress over the last six weeks.

I know that what I’m feeling right now is rather normal. I’ve had enough similar conversations with friends and colleagues who have either finished their dissertations or are working on them to know that dissertation writing hardly ever feels organic. I’m not even sure if ‘organic’ writing is anything but a myth about what writing a dissertation (or any kind of writing) is ‘supposed to be like’. Just the same, it’s not a pleasant feeling when the goal is to bring clarity to a particular topic rather than confuse the issue. But I also know that the issue I am wrestling with is itself confused, diverse, and very much tangled in knots. And it occurs to me as I wrap up tonight’s entry that what we may mean today bringing clarity to an issue--or at least what I mean by it--is to show that reading, much like translation, is not a transparent or innocent process. Something is always left out for unjustifiable reasons. Indeed, so much is left out that is quite impossible for me to cover all of it. Nor do I want to try. But where do I draw the line?

In closing,, I realize that the title of this evening’s entry has very little to do with the topic of discussion. The reference to Star Trek First Contact, for everyone playing at home, simply occurred to me as I was writing the last sentence of the previous paragraph.

Getting Side Tracked

I’ll get right to what’s on my mind as I sit down to write this entry. Last week was terrible. I only worked on my dissertation two days out of five. I normally don’t work on it on weekends either. I contemplated doing so in order to catch up, but I was rather frazzled by Friday. A dear friend is also preparing to move, and I wanted to make sure that we hung out together before she leaves the area for good sans the occasional visit. Not that hanging out took up the whole weekend. But needless to say, other things miraculously came up.

I briefly mentioned in my last blog entry from nearly a week ago that I had taken on a sizable project at work. This project was certainly the biggest reason why I got so little work done on my dissertation. I had to be finished with the project by Friday. I spent increasingly longer hours each day working on it as it became clear to me that the project--which was described to me as straight forward--turned out to be not so straightforward.

I’m going to avoid ranting about the project itself. Rants are not the goal of a blog of this sort, or at least that is not how I have envisioned it. But I do think I ought to be able to explore how I felt as a result. And the short version is that I greatly resented being side tracked for most of the week from my dissertation, since, ultimately, that is my primary responsibility at this stage. In fact, I wish it was my only responsibility. There have been periods where I have purposely tried to make it so. But I know that’s not a very realistic approach nor even a practical one. And I think attempting to make my dissertation my only responsibility has in some ways been detrimental. I might have been less upset if I had allowed myself to fully acknowledge that other tasks were bound to come up. I did, in fact, repeat this to myself as I noted that I would have to spend more and more time on the side project in order to meet my deadline. But that didn’t stop me from becoming more and more frustrated and upset each day. Had I not done so, I might have found the energy to work on my dissertation during the in-between periods where I needed to step away from the side project. Those periods became less frequent and shorter as the week wore on, but they were opportunities that I may have taken advantage of. But I did not. I felt that I was so exhausted that I chose to do nothing, by which I mean I chose to not continue to work but to occupy myself in some other way.

I think ‘choice’ says a lot here. But I want to be clear. I am not one of those who thinks that everything comes down to the choices we make in life, which is preposterous, hurtful, and insulting to those of us who have literally not been given a choice in some of the ‘issues’ that affect our lives, whether that is being LGBT, something other than white male (and I even take issue with what that means exactly, since not every white male acts like the ‘white male’ that we all think of when we hear those two words), under educated, uneducated, underemployed, unemployed, underinsured or uninsured, poor, or in some way marginalized. Nor do I necessarily think I had as much choice as I would like to have had over how last week played out for me. But I do think, or I want to think that I could have approached how I responded to being side tracked from my dissertation last week differently than I did. As I’ve already written, I might have been a bit calmer about things. Resentment is a pretty exhausting feeling. And though I did repeat a sort of mantra to myself about how things were not really in my control and that such periods are an inevitable part of the process, I don’t think I really accepted the situation. And that only added to my resentment.

I honestly don’t know where this leaves me for the next time something like this happens, as it is bound to happen. I like to believe that it is always possible to learn something from every situation, whether we make a mistake (the best way to learn) or if we do something that turns out to be effective (which is not the same thing as good). But what can I say I have actually learned here? Would I have actually done anything differently if I could do the week over again, knowing that I still would have had to prioritize the side project? I don’t think I could have done otherwise. I also know that I genuinely felt as though I couldn’t manage to squeeze any more work ethic out of myself each day.

I’ve written that I could have accepted the situation and minimized the amount of resentment I felt, but I’m not sure how I could have done that exactly. And I note that I didn’t resent spending what down time I did have during the week not playing catch up, nor for the whole of the weekend, which suggests to me that more is going on here than I am able to work out just now (partly because I’m exhausted, partly because I really hate how this blog entry is turning out, and partly because I’m avoiding ranting, although perhaps that would be really helpful to me). But what do I say at this point? Do I just move on? Do I just forget about last week and start over this week? Perhaps, but I have always been suspicious of the attitude that we should only live in and for the present. If I’ve learned anything from reading and rereading Derrida, it’s that the ‘present’ is every bit as illusory as the ‘past’ and the ‘future’, by which I mean that these constructs require a healthy amount of skepticism in terms of how we narrate our concepts of time to ourselves and to others. As such, all I can think to say in conclusion is that the lesson may be to play with how I felt, what I think that may or may not mean, and to leave what I think open ended rather than struggle for some sort of resolution which is probably illusory as well.

And Now Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Blog

It’s been quite a while since I wrote an entry. The main reason for this is that I wanted to enjoy my Fall Break and not think about my process for a bit. This plan worked out for the most part. I was surprised at how excited I was to get back to work this morning.

I also want to add that yesterday--my first day back to work--was an extremely busy one. In addition to my ‘normal’ schedule of tasks, I’ve taken on a priority project at my job that is demanding lots of my attention. As a result of this--and perhaps because it was the first day back to my usual routine--I was not feeling up to writing an entry by the time the evening rolled around yesterday.

I’m not yet sure how much I’m going to cover in this entry. It depends on how much space the following topic takes up. But I want to begin by discussing how I felt over Fall Break, since ‘down time’ is just as much a part of my dissertation process as when I am actively working. Perhaps it would be productive to think of ‘down time’ as passively working, since, at a certain point, you are taking your dissertation with you wherever you go and no matter what you do, even if it’s tucked away in the corner of your mind.

My Fall Break started out innocently enough. I worked on Thursday, as I had planned, but I stopped reviewing my close readings earlier than I have been. I told myself that this didn’t bother me, that I had been working hard for quite a long while and that I deserved a break. In short, I told myself the things we all tell ourselves when we don’t feel like doing something anymore. I also didn’t blog that day. On Friday, the only dissertation work I did was to write about my process in the morning. Or that was the plan. As I recall, I wrote about the things I might do during break. I won’t go into details. Suffice it to say, I did some of those things, though not all of them, and not in any particular order.

I didn’t do any dissertation work at all on Saturday or Sunday.

I wrote in my last entry that I don’t like to have a particular itinerary when I am on holiday. So, although I had ideas about what I might do on my break, I didn’t keep track of when I did something or how long it took me to do something. I didn’t keep a formal list of everything I might do, and I tried not to be concerned if I didn’t do everything I though about doing. I simply tried to enjoy myself. And I did enjoy myself, at first. But I was bored by Saturday evening, even somewhat depressed. I also felt a little restless.

There could be several reasons why I started to feel off by Saturday evening. But I think the main reason is that not working on my dissertation for so many days in succession didn’t feel right. I think there may be an optimal time to spend away from this kind of project. For me, that optimal time is about two days. Perhaps three if a week of work has been particularly grueling, but I think more than that is too much. I began to feel that way over break though, oddly, I felt better on Sunday. That may also be because I was more productive on Sunday as well. I ran some errands. I did some painting. And I baked several batches of pumpkin and molasses cookies, a task which took several hours all by itself, including preparation of ingredients.

As usual, there’s no pithy lesson that somehow brings everything I’ve been exploring in this entry together. But I do think it’s important for me to keep in mind that the dissertation process has rewired me to a certain extent. I think a few years ago I would have been perfectly happy to do very little work for four days in a row. That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. This isn’t to say Fall Break wasn’t beneficial. Being away from my dissertation did allow me to approach reviewing my close readings this morning and afternoon with fewer preconceptions about what I’m trying to do. But despite not being a morning person by any stretch of the imagination, I was itching to get up this morning. I practically jumped out of bed, which is not at all like me. And I’ve been going pretty steadily since waking and have handled quite a good deal more number of tasks than I usually do in the same stretch of time on a daily basis. Quite frankly, I’m surprised it’s only 17:30 now as I am writing this final sentence (and I’ve gone through the entry several times already to check for mistakes).