I wrote last fall about how ready I am to be done with coursework. That’s still true, although it sure ain’t evident lately. The end of this semester should have been relatively light, and with some industry I could have been finished, except for grading and exam negotiations, by right about now. Instead, I’m not anywhere close. I’ve been fiddling mightily the past week, taking care of things as they come up but never getting ahead.

So today, as Clancy suggested in the comments, I’m having a meeting with myself. And when I asked myself what the hell was up, it turned out the problem is that the idea of No More Seminars seems so ... lonely. I’m at the part where I’m supposed to sit quietly and read a lot of stuff for a few months. And then sit quietly in a series of rooms to take exams. And then sit in my study by myself and write write write a dissertation. No more sitting in a room with a bunch of rowdy grad students flinging theory all over the place. Unless I do all the lonely stuff right: then the reward is that I get my own roomful of rowdy graduate students.

It occurs to me that even though I’m an introvert and even though my usual process is to work alone, it would really behoove me to take advantage of reading and writing groups as this whole thing bumps along. And there’s always the lovely bloggers, so perhaps I should return to writing more about research here. And then there’s always the fact that my house is a 24-hour graduate seminar anyway.

So if there’s all that, then there’s no reason to keep procrastinating now. So the proposal will be finished and shipped off to La Collaboratora tonight. Tomorrow I'll start on the short paper, and it’ll be done by Wednesday night. Thursday and Friday to finish and enter the grades. Boom diddy boom.