Sobriquet 62.16

Naps are beautiful, beautiful things sometimes.

One of the biggest worries I had coming into the semester has been a concern for how working five days a week would affect my dissertation schedule. For the past two years, I have worked very long (my days would often exceed fourteen hours) Tuesdays and Thursdays so that I could secure long weekends for writing. Sometimes this strategy worked wonderfully, giving me a regular pattern of school-free clusters during which I could research and write my dissertation. Other times, working fourteen hours and driving two hundred miles twice weekly would result in my sleeping through a significant portion of Wednesdays and Fridays. So it had its ups and its downs. This term, as I have mentioned, I am working five days each week, just like a normal person. Only my work days will involve no more than seven hours of my time, driving included.

It's odd. I feel like I have less time because I have fewer "off" days, but I'm also unaccustomed to finishing work by, say, two in the afternoon, relaxing for a while at home, napping for a couple of hours, and waking up as fresh as the proverbial daisy, all ready to sit down and write. But that's exactly how today panned out for me. I ended up revising the paragraph I had written a couple of days ago and with which I had found so much fault yesterday. It is now two longer paragraphs with which I find significantly less fault, so I am closer to feeling satisfied with myself than I felt yesterday.

Like I said, naps are beautiful, beautiful things sometimes.

Still, now that I have elaborated this one particular sub-section, I feel the distinct need to expand the concluding bit of this mini-section of the chapter before moving on, so I may spend the next day or two preparing to do just that. Either way, I have made some progress and am, for better or worse, that much closer to being finished with this monstrosity of a dissertation!

For tomorrow: Read and/or write.