Meltdown

I'm interrupting the house tour to relate the Monday meltdown and the Tuesday rehabilitation. I spend a lot of time reading turgid academic stuff I don't understand or am not interested in. The U.N. machinery, the concept of piercing the corporate veil and the principal-agent relationship within corporate governance, philosophies around whether human rights are nonsense on stilts, as one commentator suggested, or juridicial, enforceable rights.

I'm not a lawyer. I don't have much patience for poorly written academic contortionist derivative doggerel, spending 70 pages saying X could mean this, or it might mean that, or someone else said this, but that contravenes Article 321, Section II, Subsection 8, part C as amended by Protocol 27c... we'll you get the idea.

So I wanted to quit on Monday. I have six papers due in January and I'm not enthused about most of them. And I really don't like footnotes. Or constructing papers around maximizing citations showing I've done the readings and have taken something from them.

There's no guarantee the degree will do anything for me professionally. I was pretty close to packing it in and taking a job--any job--just to get back into a known pattern of living. Then I met with my primary professor on Tuesday and he kept telling me to make the degree what I want it to be. If I don't like the assigned questions, invent my own--just incorporate some of the theories and ideas we've discussed. And he keeps telling me I need to spend less time on the readings (so why do they assign so many "required" readings?).

And the thing is, I like the other students. I am learning things that could be helpful some day. I am getting a better understanding of everything standing in the way of a more just world. And the dissertation, while daunting, is an opportunity to thoroughly research a topic that I am interested in and care about. With Queen's impressive resources at my fingertips, that is a luxury.

I could go on and on about the pros and cons of continuing and of quitting, but I won't. I spent Thanksgiving in the library researching a paper for a class called Interdisciplinary Approaches to Conflict Transformation and Social Justice. The one-day class was awful--the teacher was scattered and presenting as nondebatable a lot of debatable assertions. But I've decided to turn it into something I want to study, which is why Ferguson happened. In 1,250 words. Wish me luck.

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