Life's getting busy - probably seems busier than it should be 'cause I've gotten the first batch of student papers - always a joy *eye roll*. The one thing I dislike about the drafting process that we employ is when you tell a student to fix something in the first draft and it's still there in the final paper - erghh! I try not to take it personal, but each time I think "I am not making comments on papers because I just have so much damn time to spend doing it, or because I just love doing it - I'm doing it to teach you how to improve your writing!" Usually they pay attention, but it's the ones who need the most help who often refuse to take it. So I keep churning out the feedback and try not to get annoyed when students choose to ignore it - I only hope they return the favor and don't get too annoyed when they only get a C on the paper!

I've been starting to try to imagine a way that I can integrate all my various interests into three relatively coherent avenues of inquiry for the comprehensive exam next year (and the dissertation to follow eventually). I think it's just because it's the beginning of the year, but it might also have something to do a colleague who I greatly respect making ABD in the last few months. And he and I actually are interested in many of the same areas - science fiction, Celtic myth, memorializing in literature - so I guess I figure I need to be just as smart (though my performance on the preliminary comps last year was dismal to say the least, and not an auspicious start). He has managed to integrate many of the areas of interest by forming them all around the theme of memory. So I'm thinking I might be able to do the same thing with myth.

I'm not sure I really want to identify myself as a mythologist anymore than I wanted to be an Arthurian, but it might be a way of holding it all together. I will start to investigate the field to see if it's something I'd like to be working within for the rest of my career. That's the thing that's really starting to hit home with the idea of the comprehensives - they start to mark out a field that you will always be identified with, and I've generally resisted any kind of labelling that would see me aligned primarily with a single genre, period, or theoretical stance. I've been happy to dig into many different areas of inquiry - which provides a fairly broad overview of things, but is also at the same time much too shallow an approach for the dictates of the profession I want to enter.

I hate trying to figure this out! The things I really want to do don't all hang together in a way that will make me marketable in the future, so I need to tie them together in ways that maximize what I want and minimize the outside interference of themes, genres, theoretical or methodological stances etc that I don't want to study. But every time I think I've got it figured, I find something in the plan that I don't like. Ergh!

Too bad there wasn't such a thing as a PhD fairy godmother! I don't want to just get the degree handed to me - I just want a road map!