Happy Gurglings about Reading

I flipped the name of the blog again because the most recent name didn't quite sum up anything I felt toward anything anymore.  So that's that.

I've been largely offline for the last two weeks or so. I feel like I keep missing things going on in my online life - I have only a vague idea of what's going on in the lives of most of my online friends, I've barely been on facebook, I even managed to forget about farmville long enough to have some crops wilt.  I feel bad (mostly about missing stuff in my friends' lives), but.

Instead of being online, I've managed to read more in the last two weeks than I have since my exams. It continues to be awesomesauce.  I nabbed the brandspankingnew Philip Pullman novel on Friday and am all kinds of excited to read it.  At the moment I'm finishing Alison Croggon's Pellinor series - I think Pullman will go right after that.  Maybe I'll throw a review up when I'm finished since it's still so new.

I know I've already posted once about how happy I've been devouring books, but it's exhilarating.  I have stories flying through my head all the time now, these incandescent pieces of loveliness that remind me that there really are ways to escape the inside of my own head, or which, conversely, remind me that the inside of my own head has stories of its own that want out too.  I need to stop reading long enough to write some more but haven't wanted to. 

As I read, I'm ripping apart everything as I go along, examining how authors have gone about dealing with plot, character development, description, all that - all the stuff I never looked at while ripping apart lit for grad school.  It continually boggles my mind that after ten years of English (from the three years I worked through the major in college to the two years of my MA and five (so far) years of my Ph.D.), I've never gotten to talk about anything of those things, never really had time to examine the craft of writing for the sake of writing.  I can read and interpret ANYTHING at this point, but when it comes to thinking about the writing, this is all still fairly new to me.  It occurs to me from time to time that I should look up some books on writing and read those, see what others find important, but I haven't quite wanted to do that yet.  I think at the moment that I'm happy with what I'm picking up, and I'll move on to what others have picked up on soonish.  This isn't a "my thoughts will be more better and smarter than theirs" type feeling - it's an attempt to get some sort of idea as to what I think about things before I start to get into the prevailing wisdom of the world, much the same way I'd research a text by reading it, developing the beginnings of my own thought patterns about it, and then going off to read articles about it in order to challenge and develop my thinking even further.

AKA, I'm approaching writing now roughly like I'd approach dissertation research. *headdesk*  The more things change, as it were.

On resumes and rediscovering reading

I have a workable draft of my resume finally (erm, well, I've really had one since Sunday evening, but whatever).  So that's good.  That means I can stop with some of the overthinking and the "OMG WHAT HAVE I DONE FOR SEVEN YEARS OF MY LIFE" angsty bullshit that's made the process of writing (and re-writing, and re-writing) it so ridiculous and painful.  Because really, one's spouse's first reaction to reading one's resume should NOT be this:  "this makes you sound like you hate yourself." 

After that reaction, I took a day off and then returned to it.  Rephrased.  Rethought.  Rephrased more.  Talked it out with people.  I feel better now.

Possible interview question: variation on a theme of "what do you consider to be your biggest problem in the workplace?"
Answer:  I overthink things.  I can overthink ANYTHING.  It's like a crippling mental disorder talent.

Resume aside, I'm down to only a couple of classes before the teaching portion of my career is (99% likely) finished.  This puts me at 3 paychecks before I hit the abyss of not knowing where my money will come from.  So that's... terrifying. 

The dissertation really is on hold now, pretty much officially, until Brownie and I are moved wherever we end up moving and I'm in a better head space to deal with it.  The department, bless it, is covering my tuition until it's done.  I actually feel good about this, and in feeling good about this, have been reconceptualizing how I want to go about arguing certain aspects of it.  I had been arguing about institutional change, but what I've really been *trying* (albeit failing) to get across is that the point is to look at the effect of fiction on institutional change, which really then is the effect of fiction on our understanding and creation of reality.  Which, oddly, seems more manageable to me than institutional change itself.  And more fun.  So Imma let that keep simmering in the dark reaches of my brainspace until I'm ready to return.

Meanwhile, I've been devouring books like they're about to poof out of existence.  Lots of books.  The Hunger Games (and Catching Fire)(to feed my Gale crush) and The Elegance of the Hedgehog and Misconception and Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You and so on.  And it has been magnificent.  Like rediscovering an old, dear friend.

It feels almost strange to say "I love to read."  In some ways, I've always felt that way - I wouldn't have pursued a Ph.D. in English without loving to read.  In so many other, more important ways, however, it truly has been a rediscovery:  the joys of perusing books in the book store, of losing track of time while completely immersed in another world, of stories, plots and characters.  For so much of graduate school, reading has been associated with guilt:  if I was something I enjoy for the sake of enjoyment, then I felt guilty for it.  If I read something for class/exams/dissertation work, then I didn't enjoy it; in not enjoying it, my ADHD would flare; in the flare of the ADHD would come distraction, lesser comprehension, and more guilt.  Over the past seven years, reading has been so intricately entwined with guilt that I've largely avoided it when unnecessary.  Suddenly (almost unconsciously) letting go of the guilt has let me read again.  And that makes me really, really happy.  (As a side note, this is the first post that has had a reading tag. That says a lot to me.)