It's two weeks until the election and I'm on pins and needles.  I hate being this anxious about something, which makes me so glad we only have presidential elections every four years.  I don't need any extra anxiety in my life.

So I had a difficult but productive meeting with some of my dissertation committee this week and they finally agreed to let me stop data collection now.  It's been a very difficult two years and I don't have very many subjects to show for it, but they relented and a back up plan was formulated to justify the small n.  I had been losing serious sleep over that meeting, so I'm relieved it's over and I can move forward now.  This whole dissertation thing is really rough.  I always heard it was rough, but I don't think I ever really appreciated it until now.  It doesn't help that sweets seemed to just cruise through his dissertation.  He never called ME crying after a committee meeting, after all.  But then again, he rarely emotes in the first place, so I guess I can't base his dissertation struggles on that observation.  I was thinking this morning how nice it would be to have him, say, appreciate things about us or me in a more vocal way.  And then I remembered that I married a yankee WASP from Rhode Island, and decided to appreciate the fact that he even talks in full sentences.  (And now I'm wondering if the phrase "yankee WASP from Rhode Island" is full of redundancies and which ones.  Does yankee automatically connote WASP?  Does WASP mean Yankee?  Is Rhode Island the uneccesary descriptor? hmmm.  Is there a class of Mendocino WASPs? Is the whole phrase offensive?)

Now that I'm in the home stretch, I am starting to look through my myopic little viewfinder and visualize what's on the other side.  Obviously, with a PhD the clear choice would be to go into academics.  But see, I don't see myself as a teacher.  That whole teaching thing doesn't really appeal to me nearly as much as clinical practice and research.  But now that I'm nearing the end of this dissertation, I'm not so convinced that I need to be engaging in research as much.  I'm pretty burned out on all of this crap, in fact.  It doesn't help that I've basically let my certification lapse and have to jump through all sorts of colorful and exciting hoops to get that reinstated.  This morning I was daydreaming about how nice it would be to get an RN position with a hospice agency.  Nothing too complicated, a place to sit back and just pull in a paycheck every two weeks.  None of this begging people to please talk to me and begging people to respond to my fucking phone calls.  None of this fretting over where the next grant is coming from and how it will be administered.  Just a simple 9-hour day where I can clock in and clock out and then leave it behind.  We could turn the office back into the dining room and I can check my email from a tiny and decorative little desk in the corner of the kitchen, instead of the overwhelmingly disorganized pile of paper I call central command now.  Oh, that smells so sweet.

I'm trying not to think about it right now because daydreaming about an easy life will act as the perfect unmotivator.  Not a good plan.  Oh, shit. 

But I came to this because I want to help people in a way that is much broader than individual patient care.  I was given certain gifts in this world, my family was given certain gifts in this world.  We were given money and status because my grandfather worked his ass off and made amazing art.  Things haven't been very difficult for me, beyond the personal obstacles most people face.  I've never had to live in my car, I still have both my parents, I have two wonderful children and even though we're broke right now we can still put them in daycare enough hours of the day so I can work on my dissertation.  My level of broke is nowhere near what many people consider broke.  It's my responsibility to pay back, to return to the community all the good that we've been given.  And since one of my gifts is a brain and a good education, that's how I can contribute.  Maybe it's too much to take on and I should step back and just focus on what makes me happy, but I think even if I did that I would still come to the conclusion that what makes me happy is serving other people.

Fuck, this shit is complicated.

Comments

[Ally]

Sounds like a great committee meeting, congrats on moving forward!

In my career there is the eternal tension between academic and practitioner, between broad and narrow focus as well. I thought I had hit the sweet spot with my current job, as I am a practitioner of sorts, but also involved with policy and my organization has a broad view and influence. But I'm restless now, and thinking it is time for the pendulum to swing toward more narrow in focus. I guess what I'm saying is, the next choice you make won't be the last. We're young yet - there's plenty of time to try it all.

[jstar]

finishing up a project is always the hardest for me. i loooove starting out with shiny ideals and expectations. and i get really LOW and bored when it is in the middle of all the actual gruntwork of execution. by the end i just hate it. the good news is that you are on the home stretch and you WILL get there. you have a timeline.

the clock-in/clock-out kind of job can be really appealing after you've put so much exhausting effort into something. it might not be a bad stepping stone until you gear yourself up again and find that bigger picture type job.

in any case.. it is all very exciting!