another day; another. . . ah. . . what was that?

OK. So today I started with the thought that I'd get right to work and it's after noon already and where did the morning go?!

It snuck past me, somehow, in between the Chicago Manual or MLA Handbook discussions ( and it now appears I'm to do Chicago style - not MLA - and this is a good thing, I think, because I really don't like all those parentheses and oh! I hope Chicago uses footnotes like sensible humans) - and the other writer consults on such diverse topics as Mean Girls, soup recipes, lesbian parenting and switch-overs to a Mac (which is computer-related and not in any way meant to be gender preferential, so don't give me a hard time!). Then there was the realization that I like the Bigelow Plantation Mint tea rather than the Bigelow Mint Medley - and that took some time to work through. And why would one company want to make two different kinds of mint tea? I don't know.

Well I am writing, and this is good, but I'm writing here and I need to be writing on the dissertation, and that is bad. But it's OK, because when I'm done here, I'll get back to there and hopefully things will move along rather rapidly.

We're mostly done with chapter 4 - and I'm in negotiations as to whether or not I really need a chapter 5. Or whether I can call it a day, write the CONCLUSION and then start RE-writing what I've already written.

And putting it into proper Chicago-style. (once I figure out what that is.)

I'm a little schizophrenic these days. Reading my 'writers' - and I found a really splendid one on a site called woulda coulda shoulda (sorry, no time to figure out how to do the link thing. . . . maybe later. Gotta write, remember?!) - and then reading my academics. . . . There's a really big difference in 'voice'. The academics generally have none. They have a lotta words, and the challenge is getting to know them all and how to negotiate the paragraph-long sentences and come up with a meaning at the end of it all. My academic supervisor keeps writing things like tone and too poetic in my margins. But I'm getting better at the faceless, personality-less voice. And even the king admitted last night that I was fully the master of the long, convoluted, distinction-drawing and nuance-suggesting sentence. Containing words that are NOT IN THE DICTIONARY. (let alone on spell-check).

www.dictionary.com helps sometimes - it had 'aporia', but not 'originary' or 'phronesis'. For that, you need google and I'm amazed at what is on wikipedia these days! Amazing.

Just today, for example, I learned about the 'flying spaghetti monster' - I think it was. Complete with the little fish-shaped car emblem it seeks to spoof. Actually, I think it started out spoofing 'intelligent design' teaching, and demanded that the schools institute a teaching on the flying spaghetti monster and it took off from there. (and OK - I took the time to get out the HTML HOW-TO to look up "links". . . . Lucky you! So while I'm at it, here's the woulda coulda shoulda link).

Anyway, point being: there's a lot of junk out there.

Enough to keep me busy enough to not notice an entire morning slip out the back door.

Some of the writing is laughable and inane. Some makes me think I'll never be a writer - a real writer - myself. The best makes me want to sit and think. And then write.

That's the kind of writer I'D like to be.