Purgatory?

Limbo? Intermediate state? Don't know if any of those captures list-building, or waiting to hear back on a job.

For three months or so now I've endured the seemingly never-ending process of creating and structuring a list that will then shape my dissertation, adding to it, submitting it to advisors, editing it per their suggestions, and repeating. Endlessly. Like seven times. Here's where linking it to the idea of purgatory works...while I started with sort of a generally fuzzy topic of what I might possibly think about sort of writing on, I now have a nice tidy topic, with a descriptive list that relates to it, and appropriate criticism. The dross has been officially refined out. I'm left with just the good stuff. And as of yesterday, my advisor thinks so too. HOORAY!

But the process still isn't done. I now have to submit it to committee members and go through the same thing again with them as well. It really never ends.

On top of this prolonged process, we're still waiting to hear if Ben has a job with Miami's IT services department. If he does, we'll be leaving here and moving home! Their Spanish department wants me as an instructor starting in January...they've offered me teaching classes of majors and minors, plus the potential for starting a theater production class. I'm thinking that this, plus the fact that we'd get to be real people with a real house and real jobs with real benefits would be a nice change from teaching the terminal GE requirement as a student whose little family is bursting out of our apartment. But we have to wait. Still. Some more. Until the folks reviewing Ben's application decide to give him a yea or nay.

Being in the middle is frustrating to me, because I like to progress. But I have to remind myself that life IS the middle. I just have to come to terms with it.

My life is a comic strip....

.....did that happen because I had kids?

Here we go.

I've often pondered on how it is that I managed to have a daughter who is SO different from me in so many ways, and yet so like me in others. The things that are different amaze me because I don't know where they came from (why she loves pink, why she hates to sleep, why she's a tv addict when I could survive on a movie a month....etc). The thinks that are like me cause trouble (she's just as stubborn as I am, loves to talk as much as I do but uses her words to be mean and rebellious, and insists on having the last word...gee I don't know where THAT came from).

I love her a ton, though. She's taught me more about myself than I could have learned in any other medium, and I'm more proud of her than I am of ANY research I've ever done/produced. I tell her every night that she's my best girl, to which she of course responds "Yeah, I am."

Marriage/family

Amen to THIS.

I especially like the part where she mentions that so many of the kids with babies don't connect their impoverished, chaotic lives with the fact that they've made poor choices.

One of my biggest things I try to do is teach Bee (and eventually J) that the things they do have consequences...both good and bad. Hopefully they'll be able to accept a little accountability, and make the connection between good choices and a good life.

Not that good choices mean your life will be easy. Easy and good are not the same. But that's a WHOLE different post.