Printed and mailed!

And good riddance.

I can't say I like the revision I sent to my committee on Monday afternoon, but in the limited time I had to address all the comments from my advisor, I did the best I could with the file. The hard copy, which goes to the graduate college review board for more technical assessments (formatting for the purposes of binding, archiving, etc.), went out from the post office today.

So I am, until my defense a week from Monday, free of responsibility for this draft!

The last two weeks have been disheartening because the writing really did become an endeavor for the purpose of finishing my degree, to satisfy my advisor's concerns rather than adhering to the larger vision I had (and still have) for the book project. Because the work is by nature incomplete -- writing a book and writing a thesis are not on the same scale -- and because the thesis also needs to be "complete," i.e., must set forth enough evidence of thought and inquiry into my subject to merit a sense of a focused investigation, I found myself revising at cross-purposes when I tried to satisfy my instincts and my professor's. Obviously, she and the rest of my committee will determine whether I graduate, so I ended up making some changes that I will be taking out again once I have the degree in hand. (I'm trying not to think about the remaining round of post-defense revisions that I'll have to complete before that happens.)

Life here has calmed down some since my last post. It's a relief. Thank you to the lovely people who sent private words of encouragement -- you know who you are. You helped me endure a craptacular two weeks where everything seemed to go pear-shaped and I had no choice but to get through it.

In the interim before my defense, I'll be doing some serious decompression (in between a lot of backlogged household chores). And I have a new project. Not one I'd say I elected to take on, but one that has taken on unexpected priority. More on that very soon ...

How to eff the ineffable

A writer classmate of mine once used that phrase, which she'd acquired from a former professor. I'm invoking it now because, well, there's a lot I'd like to eff.

I don't mean eff as in that wonderfully flexible expletive I would have liked to utter (as noun, adjective, verb, or other part of speech -- thank you, George Carlin) when, at the end of yesterday, my manuscript was not in my hands. Yes, I've e-mailed my professor to get the tracking number.

No, I mean, the unbloggable kind of things I'd like to eff. There are those things that, though usually not trotted out in conversation with acquaintances, I do write about here: thoughts on family, thoughts on illness.

But then there's the stuff of ugly fights, in person, on the phone. The kinds of things you take to a mediator because you just don't have the perspective to work through them in a constructive way. Because both parties involved are raw.

That's been the last month, after many more months of buildup. And I'm not inclined to go into it here because it's not constructive. Not yet.

But that plan for getting through thesis? Well, it works when it's just thesis stuff getting me down. It's not enough for the specific kind of loneliness you feel after you hang up (by mutual agreement), after you sit for hours in silence not knowing what to say or do (because the alternative -- speaking -- will make things worse).

This is what makes my thesis feel so pointless sometimes.

Yes, we have professionals lined up; yes, it's helping. A lot. I don't want to imagine where we'd be without all that in place. We are so new, however, to the changes we've agreed to make, so used to the old habits. Under duress, we fall back on what we know and everything refragments.

I confess: yesterday, I totally effed my plan. Today, I get back to it. And reshape it to address what I can't eff here.

Pruning and grafting

My manuscript is somewhere over the U.S. today.

I'd e-mailed the full draft to my advisor last week, as instructed. She wrote me a harried reply late Sunday night to say she'd only started reading it that day, was halfway through, and was exhausted. (She's teaching an overload and is on seven other thesis committees, she said, as she's said numerous times this semester.) She'd been writing directly on the hard copy she'd printed off. Could I give her my address so she could mail it to me, two-day air? Just the first six chapters. On the seventh, she'd had nothing to suggest.

Nothing? That gave me some pause. They say any editor, when she's giving your work the attention it ought to have, should be able to find something.

I gave my advisor the information, hoping she'd keep duplicates in case what she was sending got lost. I almost asked her if she'd do that for me, just for my own peace of mind. But I couldn't quite ask her to make copies. She was already fried. She didn't need to hear my implied mistrust -- of her judgment, the postal service, the universe. I'm working on that last one, but old habits die hard, especially after last year.

When that package hits the front porch tomorrow, I'll need to be in the frame of mind to dive in, assess what and where to add or subtract with my advisor's guidance, limited as I'm afraid it might be. And I knew that, when I sent it off, given her increasingly frazzled notes in the last two months. So I took the last days of the previous week and the weekend to leave the draft completely, to prepare myself: laundry, yard cleanup. I can't edit well when I'm surrounded by clutter.

The lavender we planted two summers ago is turning green again after the winter. And it was looking leggy. I squatted for an hour, clipping away dead wood, tidying, shaping, peering at tiny silver shoots, trying to determine how the plants would look in a few weeks' time when they had filled out.

This morning, I saw them from the kitchen window -- six little fuzzy globes by the flagstone walk -- and mumbled some kind of prayer: let me be able to see what I need to see tomorrow and for the rest of this month.

The routine my advisor and I have kept for the past two years has been more like this: I send her pages; she writes a note back summing up her general impressions with a list of specific concerns at the end. It sounds like I'll be getting the specifics as they appear in the margins, but the big picture, right when it really matters? That's what she won't be pulling together for me; she asked my permission, in a way, to be excused from that. I'm disappointed. If there was ever a time that the larger impression felt crucial -- but I can't worry about it. There just isn't anything more I can ask of her, so enough. I'll make do.

Six little fuzzy globes, six hairy chapters. At least it's not a delicate bonsai ...

Addendum 4/6: No package as of 8 p.m. PDT. Insert choice expletive here.