DISHEVELED. WRITERLY. STILL NOT DONE.

Well, I've done it. I've become that scruffy grad student writer type that I wanted to be, then swooned over, then wanted to be again. For several days last week, I shuffled around the house with my coffee cup (usually with cold coffee because I'd absentmindedly left it in the other room at some point and forgotten to drink it but needed the caffeine and couldn't be bothered to spend the time making more), trying to get work done. I never washed the cup, just filled it when it ran dry, and I wore the same clothes for days in a row--even went in to school in them.

I stared at the screen, typed furiously in bursts, developed tics for when I couldn't think, and developed 'writing habits.' The best of these involves working in every chair in the house (plus my bed) during the course of one heavy writing day. What happens is I hit a block, can't think clearly, don't know which problem to tackle next. So what do I do? I move to a new space--a new chair, the desk instead of the table, my bed instead of the arm chair by the window--and then I work until it happens again. It works pretty well; I recommend it.

Less productive habits include eating too much toast (and not enough else), watching horrible home buying and/or cooking shows as a study break, and making a really obsessive round of all the blogs I've ever heard of about every half hour. If your hit counts have gone up, don't get too excited--it might just be that I've got essays due!

So far, these mechanisms have gotten me through all of last semester and 2 presentations and 3 essays of this semester. I've got two more essays due this week, an exam and one final essay due next week. I should post a picture at the end of May--or even a series to document my deterioration--I'm sure I'll have some serious Einstein hair, coffee-stained clothes and panda bear eyes by the end of this. I guess we'll need to have some video to capture the jittery insanity of it all, as well.

Writing is still hard and I'm not sure any of it is decent. For this last essay, I was extremely pleased with the new structure that came to me miraculously in a 4:00 am vision the night before it was due, but less than impressed with the actual text I managed to write to fill in the glorious shell. If only I had had a couple more hours, you'd be seeing me near the words Nobel and groundbreaking in the New York Times before long. Alas, I had to turn in some sloppiness. My beloved endearing proclaimed his certainty that the ideas will shine through. I'm not so sure. I think I've learned the lesson that looking and acting like an insane genius does not turn you into one.

PS. Yes, I know the photo has nothing to do with anything. I just thought you needed something to look at. It's from St. Fagan's Museum of Welsh Life, taken last summer, before I lost my mind.