Calculus of Comps

Here's an average day right now:

7 am: Coffee, coffee, coffee. BBC.

7:30: Run along river, normally just a walk but currently too much excess nervous energy to burn. I enjoy the new Mandy Moore song. Shut. Up.

9:00: Read notes. Reread notes. Wonder why my brain cannot hold the same quantity of information as say, a competitive eating champion's stomach can hold in hot dogs. Spend some time overthinking the metaphor. Search in vain for distractions from work. Pay bills! Do laundry! Blog! Email! Done. Back to notes.

11:30: Coffee, coffee. Fifteen minutes of staring into space and lamenting choice of academic career. Second wind in which I immediately feel that I will not only take and pass the comps this summer but write the entire dissertation as well as teach a class, open a cupcake bakery, start the revolution and publish groundbreaking articles. This lasts 30 seconds, at which point stark fear takes over again aaaaaand it's back to rereading notes.

12:00: Lunch break. Fail to fix dishwasher. Recruit Jake. Ignore gender implications as brain is too full right now. Consider letting Paola take my comps, as she's spending all her time studying with me currently. She's quite snuggly these days, apparently she has a renewed sense of her own mortality since recent events. Become irate over Supremes' decision today to basically resegregate public schools, which relies on the precedent of Brown. Shameful moment of feeling a tiny bit vindicated that it proves my thesis accurate. Spend fifteen minutes or so hating white people who claim to be victims of "racism" because they couldn't get their brat into their first-choice kindergarten. Return to work renewed by some good old-fashioned righteous indignation.

12:30: Read journal articles. This is probably the most valuable comps-related thing to do, and now I wish I'd been doing it all along, but hey. Reading books -- psshhh, useless! I sincerely doubt anyone would care to know my article recommendations, but for those few of you who are in my field (who've undoubtedly already read it, since you are in my field) -- I just reread Steigerwald's article on consumer history for the third time and now feel like I didn't get it at all the first two times because it suddenly makes lots more sense than ever before. This horrifies me in light of the fact that I will not in any way have time to read other articles (or books or whatever) three times in order to finally clue in. Crap.

3:00: Pop tylenol. Initiate midday moratorium on coffee. Torture self with the thought, borrowed from Saru, that somewhere, some pasty guy at Yale who wears a bow-tie and suspenders at the age of 25 (hey, they were in my medieval legal history class at the big H -- I'm not making these critters up!) is also about to take his comps and is mainly concerned that he may not get that tenure-track job at Princeton. Whereas I only seem able to worry about the eternally-realistic-seeming possibility of winding up homeless in Washington Square Park, muttering something about Pennoyer v. Neff and lining my shopping cart with socialist propaganda. Place limit on neurotic breakdowns to fifteen minutes at a time in order to increase productivity.

5:30: Look over notes on answers to potential questions. Momentary concern that many of my subfields have suspiciously similar answers. Look, I didn't invent agency/structure or consumerism or race/class/gender or cultural history or transnationalism, OK? Fine, I'll be more specific. Longer moment of concern over the mention by Trust in Steel's adviser at a dinner last weekend, when I told him my committee membership, that I should "watch out for Professor X, he can be unpredictable." If you know my committee, I doubt you need further clarification. Crap. Console self that it could be worse. Right? I could think of a few other members of the faculty that I would not want to have on my committee. Reflect for the 571st time that I wish this was a written exam and not an oral evisceration. Back to answers.

7:00: Erin makes dinner. Pierogis, etc. Then I sit and "think" for a while (read: space out), then some berry picking. We get three or four cups of raspberries off our bushes every day right now. It's absurd. Not to mention the strawberry patch. I could always be a berry farmer. Return to notes refreshed by berry sojourn. Erin vows to make jam tomorrow. Appreciate the roommates and friends who have tolerated my neurotic ways for the last...let's call it months.

9:30: Freak out for the ten thousandth time that I don't know who was governor of New York colony in mid-1700s. This is like my warm blanky of freak out topics this week, since I stolidly refuse to look it up, because then what would I freak out about? It's comforting! OK, it was George Clinton. I now officially need a new blanky. Look, I'm not a colonialist, OK? Moment of fear that I will lapse into Valley-girl speak in the middle of exam? Consider that I might, you know, punctuate all my answers with question marks? Contemplate that actually, um, my life is not that hard? Like, I could have to scrub toilets or mine diamonds so maybe I should stop complaining? And I should stop this post, because now I'm just using it to get out of work.

Rinse, repeat, for two more weeks. The sick thing is, at times I'm even enjoying the -- you know, what they call it? -- learning. Thinking. Clarifying thoughts and ideas. It's the examining process that feels like just flat-out meanness. But ultimately, as I remembered last week and forgot in the intervening period, thus far I have defied what most sociological models would predict I would do with my life (in a good way), so even if I screw up now and for the next sixty years straight, it's all just gravy. Yeah, that was more comforting last week.