Mind, Unraveled

I've never been good at splitting a single day's attention among more than one or two complicated tasks, and I'm even worse at dispersing work for a single task across more than one day. But I've been doing both relentlessly over the past week - since I started actually writing my thesis - and the result, I'm finally realizing, is not good. I'm just not getting things done. If I'd been able to sit down for five or six days in a row with nothing to do but write my thesis, I'd be done by now. I would've been impossible to be around for those five or six days, but at least I would be done. As it is, I've been trying to balance my work on my thesis with work for the class I teach, work for the class I'm taking, preparation for my comprehensive exams, and my actual life (that thing that would be so easy to forget I have if I didn't force myself to come out of my academic haze once in a while to cook and clean and make love and go to friends' houses to watch fantastically erotic movies). And trying to balance all of those things has led to this: I write an average of two or three measly pages a day on my thesis, I haven't done any of the reading for tomorrow night's class except the section on Nietzsche (and I read that only because I have to present on it), I haven't graded the writing exercises or the five revised papers I need to hand back tomorrow, I haven't thorougly organized my thoughts on the movie my class will be discussing tomorrow, I've barely thought about the questions I need to devise for my rhetorical theory comp, and my house is grossing me out.

This afternoon I had an hour or so of brilliant clarity, and none of this bothered me. I was certain that all of these things would fall naturally into place in the next few days, and I was looking forward to the transcendent feeling of accomplishment when that happened. Then I finished reading Nietzsche, and the clarity devolved into muddled despair. Because, it turns out, the last parts of Nietzsche's theory of tragedy confuse the hell out of me and I think preparing my presentation will take up much more time and brain juice than I had planned. If only I could sit down and focus for a while on grading those papers, I think the clarity might return. But I feel panicky now, and I'm afraid to try focusing on anything because I dread the feeling of disappointment that's so familiar to me lately.

But I will try. Wish me luck.