This is Not My Narrative

Small Epiphanies: December 31

This is the first year in a long time that my New Years Resolution isn’t “Finish my dissertation.”

And frankly, that feels kind of weird. I don’t quite know what to do with myself.

Usually, about this time of year, I’m trying to remember what my dissertation is about, and where I left off, and whether or not I can actually do what I set out to do when I started writing. Or whether I even want to.

This year, I am absent that sort of panic.

I am, however, having my usual New Year Fit of Organization. I just placed an order at the Container Store. All sorts of boxes and bins to organize my life and my desk.

I have, for years, thought this was a dissertation procrastination tool, but maybe not, because it’s lingering. The biggest post-dissertation indulgence I’ve been looking forward to is reorganizing my bookshelves, and purging. All the books I used for my dissertation that I don’t LOVE, or that didn’t change my life, or that I thought I was going to use, but didn’t–gone.

Imagine, on the shelves of your local Good Will, such choice items as Uncommon Sense: Theoretical Practice in Language Education,  or Writing the Qualitative Dissertation, or Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing or even  Autobiography and Postmodernism (although I think I might want to keep that one). Oh, but definitely The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. Someone might actually pick that one up.

Just let me know and I can hold any one of these for you.

And then, post-purge, I will create a new, fright-inducing, section of “Books I Have Bought But Not Yet Read,” aka “Books I Think I Should Read,” to inspire me both to read, and to stop buying.

Post-dissertation, I like to use “post-” as a prefix for EVERYTHING.

Post-creation of the new “Books I Think I Should Read” section, I will stop saying “should.”

And think about what I could do next.

Be it resolved.

This entry was posted on January 1, 2013 at 4:55 am and is filed under Small Epiphanies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.