Progress.

So when I hate getting up in the morning to write my dissertation, I never feel like I’m getting enough done. But I hit the mark of being a fraction of a page shy of 50 today. The department guides say 150-250 pages, but my director said 120. I’m aiming at the lower number of around 150 all told, and I hope I stay there. I get wordy.

In other awesomeness, you know that Indigo girls song where they sing:

I spent four years prostrate
To the higher mind
Got my paper
And I was free

Well, I found a great Nietzsche quotation in Thus Spoke Zarathustra which has a better image:

For this is the truth: I have moved from the house of the scholars and I even banged the door behind me.

I ran into an old professor last week, and we were talking about my leaving academia. I was really at a loss for how to talk about my…position without being insulting in a way that I don’t mean to be or want to be.

This is, of course, why I’m usually silent about it here. Enough academics read it that I know I’d get crap for things that I don’t really mean but that seem plausibly my opinions from where I’m headed with my life and career.

Can I have my positions and opinions on what academia means to me without people universalizing them and saying that I did it?