{"id":552,"date":"2007-02-14T01:20:43","date_gmt":"2007-02-14T06:20:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/womantalk.wordpress.com\/2007\/02\/14\/thesis-pain-versus-wedding-planning-pain\/"},"modified":"2007-02-14T01:20:43","modified_gmt":"2007-02-14T06:20:43","slug":"thesis-pain-versus-wedding-planning-pain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/?p=552","title":{"rendered":"thesis pain versus wedding planning pain"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my first year of writing my thesis, one of the original members of my thesis committe (Alison Pearlman, who wrote Unpacking the Art of the 1980s<\/em>) made this casual comment: Maybe you should just forget the old draft and start fresh… you have all the information in your head, right?<\/p>\n

At the time, sitting in my favorite garden cafe in Pasedena, I could not even begin to fathom holding all the research I had excavated, all the tiny thoughts I had expanded – in my head at once. Now, many, many drafts later, every sentence I read is nauseatingly familiar; I can’t see what I am trying to say or tell whether I have said it already.<\/p>\n

But I am getting close, very close. Close to where I could pound out the final draft with a couple of all-nighters. But the closer I get, the more it chafes to reread and the more difficult it becomes to focus.<\/p>\n

And the wedding planning has also become painful – so much so that now I procrastinate wedding planning by working on my thesis. I have come to realize that the fusion of two families may be almost as excruciating as the fission of a family. Could I really be saying that marriage (or approaching marriage) is as agonizing as divorce? Well, if tears are any measure, wedding planning is gaining by the hanky-ful.<\/p>\n

My mood is so foul I should really just stay in my bedroom until it passes. Instead, I’ll brew another cup of black tea, work on the thesis an hour and then post. And repeat.<\/p>\n

I probably should not be watching war movies filled with soldiers clutching hand grenades to their chests (Letters from Iwo Jima<\/strong> and Silmido<\/strong>), or reading a book about a man slowly going crazy in his midlife (A Spot of Bother<\/em> by Mark Hadden) and alternating it with a book about an odorless murderer (Perfume<\/em> by Thomas Suskind). But I can’t help myself. I want to wallow.<\/p>\n

Nothing is wrong with my life. This is just me in a black mood. It’s funny; people think I reveal so much when I post, but really, it seems like there is so much more that I choose not to disclose. Hell, it’s all painful – relationships, mothering, friendships, decisions, and especially change<\/em>…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my first year of writing my thesis, one of the original members of my thesis committe (Alison Pearlman, who wrote Unpacking the Art of the 1980s) made this casual comment: Maybe you should just forget the old draft and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73,124],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marriage","category-thesis"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}