Shut Up and Work

For the last year or so, I've had my Comp I students keep a blog over the course of the semester. It requires them to write on a regular basis and hopefully introduces them to the value of writing as a tool for thought, invention, recollection, etc. They get to write it about whatever they want, so I've had cooking blogs, Jeep blogs, music, movies, your name it. One student last semester wrote about success. He said up front it was his goal in life to become really wealthy and so he was making as study of what makes people financially successful. Oddly enough, there was no post about becoming an English instructor as a way of rolling in the Benjamins. Anyway, he did introduce a new idea in one of his posts that really got me thinking. It was about goal setting, and he said something about how when we make our goals really public, it sometimes saps us of our motivation to work on the goal. He made a 30 day goal for himself on the blog but didn't say what the goal was. He wrote, "My reason for not telling you what my goal is derives from another video I watched on TED. This speaker explains how telling people our goals makes them less likely to happen. This is unlike most of the information that I have read about in the many self-help style of books that I have read but it does make sense. He says that by telling people our goals it gives us the satisfaction that we already have it, because of that we feel less motivated in obtaining them."

I found this fascinating because, like this student, I've always heard that it's important to tell people what you're shooting for because it makes you more accountable and, therefore, more likely to do it. But the more I thought about it, the more correct it seemed. In my past, any time I announced I was spending Christmas break/spring break/summer/long weekend/whatever working on a story or working on my dissertation, it almost never happened. I've spent a lot of time saying I was going to work on my dissertation only to pick at it here and there and then suddenly find a reason to shut down the computer and instead go help clean the house/break up a fight the kids are having/go to lunch with Suzy/etc.?

So I am essentially out of time with my PhD program. They like you to be done in seven years or less, and my seventh year ended this Christmas. It's embarrassing to write that. That's a really long time. Long enough that I don't want to dwell on it. Anyway, I applied for and received a one-year extension, and it swiftly became clear it was time to stop being a dilettante and get to work.

Don't get me wrong. It isn't as though I wasn't doing anything. I had my prospectus, I had rough chapter outlines, and I had about 60 pages of rough draft. But obviously, when you're on borrowed time, you need better than just that.

So, the day after Christmas, I began in earnest and, except for my wife and kids, I didn't mention it to anyone. When people asked what I was doing over break, I would say, "Just hanging out, you know? Not much." I kept my work a secret and found that I worked more and better because of it. The only pressure to work came from me and not some external, "Oh, I mentioned to so-and-so that I'm working over break so I'd better get to it" kind of thing.

So every morning except Sundays, I put on my bathrobe and padded downstairs to our cold, concrete basement. I'd turn on the brass banker's lamp that came from on top of my parents' piano, crank up the space heater near my feet, and start chipping away. The first day, I wrote a thousand words and came back upstairs at about 10:30. Suzy, to her everlasting credit, said, "A thousand words is good, but why don't you go see how much more you can get done? Write until noon." So I did that and ended up with just over three thousand words for the day.

So I started with twenty thousand words and sixty odd pages on December 26. Day before yesterday, I emailed a copy of my draft to my committee chair that over 55,000 words and 165 pages. So I nearly tripled my word count and more than doubled my page count in slightly less than two months. Some days I wrote close to 3k words, other days I barely picked out a thousand. I worked at home until school started back up and then I began working in a study carrel in the library during my office hours. I grew a beard, wore the same bathrobe every day, and didn't change my desktop background on my computer because whatever I was doing was working. (Superstitious? Maybe a little.)

Now, of course, the way I approached this was totally the wrong way to go about it. Generally, students write a chapter, send it in, get feedback, make revisions, resubmit, and then, once they get approval, move on to the next chapter. That prevents anyone from going wildly off track and writing a hundred pages of wrong-headed stuff. For me, for my life and times, this simply wasn't an option. I teach five sections of comp every semester. I have three kids. I only have a year to get this thing done. There's no time to lovingly, carefully scour each chapter hand in hand with my adviser.

Consequently, in all likelihood, there are probably some major revisions heading my way - assuming my adviser doesn't just ignore me altogether for this breach of academic etiquette. (He wouldn't do that. He may not be pleased with me, but he won't ignore me.) I know there are problems with the draft. The conclusion is weaker than Kip Dynamite. There's a fairly serious lack of theory-related sources in several of the chapters. It's personal to the point of being memoir-ish at times. It focuses a lot on Mormon doctrine at a time when Mormonism isn't super popular in the generally very liberal world of academia.

Having said all that, I have a 165 page draft with an intro, six chapters, and a conclusion on my hands, and, as I say to my students all the time, a bad draft on the page is infinitely better than a good idea in your head. A draft is something. You can revise it, alter it, expand or cut it. You have something to work with. An idea not written down is about as valuable as sculpting with air. There's nothing there to work with.  

So that's something, and I think I owe at least some of that progress to just keeping my big yap shut and going to work. Now life is just a matter of catching up on all the things I neglected while working on the dissertation (I started grading papers today. Eesh.) and waiting to hear back from my committee chair. Hopefully, he'll get back to me soon and will have at least as many good things to say as bad things to say. He will have work for me to do, that's for sure. One other thing that's for sure is that, when I start doing that work, you won't hear about it until it's done.

Small Things

I helped a family move into the ward last week. It was a familiar scene - a bunch of guys from the Elders' quorum and a few of the more robust high priests moving up and down the ramp of a moving truck, taking boxes to different corners of the house as directed by the harried, obviously tired wife. They only had one truck (not three like some other people who shall remain nameless) but it was a big one, and it was well-packed.

My cousin, Scott, was there with his son-in-law helping schlep this family's boxes of books, pans, clothes, and whatever else. One fun thing about moving to Midland is that Scott Pennock and his family live here. The Pennocks were always celebrities at my house growing up. Aunt Fay and Uncle Bob's house was a dreamland for kids - an in-ground trampoline, a giant barn, a whole closet of toys and games in the day room, and, most importantly for me, at least a couple of cardboard boxes of late 60s/early 70s comic books. Literally, some of my earliest memories are of me poring over copies of Adventures in Space and Green Lantern every time we visited the Pennocks. Of course, my cousins Karen and Kathie were the lovely older sisters I never had. They doted on  my brothers and me and put up with our endless supply of teasing and general gross boy stupidity.

Anyway, Scott is the oldest Pennock and was out of the house before I knew what was going on. I always knew of him (mission to Spain, law school, living in Florida) but never really knew him well as a person. So as luck would have it, he and his family have been in Midland (he works for Dow Chemical as a contract lawyer) for over twenty years. They are pillars of the ward here and have been a huge resource for us from the beginning.

The thing about Scott being the oldest is that he knew my Grandpa Sheffield better than we younger grandkids. For that matter, he knew my parents longer than I did. (A funny thing to say but true.) So it's been a nice thing to sit and chat with him (usually during the milling-around-BS-session that happens just prior to Priesthood opening exercises at church) about family. We trade funny stories about his siblings. (Everyone loves a funny story about Karen!) and we talk about my folks.

This is a really long way of getting around to something pretty small and insignificant. Last week when we were both helping this family move in, I had grabbed the bottom half of a rocker-recliner and was carrying it into the house when Scott passed me and said, "You know, I just got a flash of Dennis there just now. The way you bear-hugged that thing and just started hauling it into the house - that's exactly something your dad would have done." I laughed and told him that Dennis wouldn't have asked for help whereas there wasn't any way I could actually get it through the door and could he help me out? He helped me manage it through the door and we moved on to the next set of boxes.

It was such a small thing, but I keep thinking about it. Growing up, I always felt like I was the son who was least like Dad. Physically, personality-wise, all of it. I took painting lessons and acted in plays while actively hating being taught how to fix an engine or install drywall. I was emotional and talkative whereas ol' Dennis was...shall we say, not?

I really came to appreciate Dad and his ridiculous arsenal of skills and abilities when I got older. I wish now I had retained a lot more of the practical things he tried to teach me how to do. As I've written here before, he and I became friends in that last fifteen years years of his life and I'm so glad that we did.

But I still don't think of myself as particularly Dennis-y and a lot of the time I wish I was more so. His problem-solving skills, his wisdom and facility with finances, his laconic "let's just get it fixed" attitude, his titanic work ethic. There was so much in him that I see lacking in myself.  Having Scott see some insignificant flash of Dad in me makes me both happy and sad. I'm glad there are bits of him in me (even if it is only the way I manhandle furniture), but as always, I'm just sad that he's not around to be the real deal.   

February

Time to check in again. I don't mean for these to be monthly posts. I really would like them to be more frequent, but for now, this is as good as it gets. I'm on the verge of finishing a big project, and once that's done, I'll have more discretionary time to do things like review movies and complain about the weather.

It's Friday afternoon, and Avery is at home today. She's been complaining all week about not feeling well. She didn't have a fever, cough, diarrhea, or any other sign of sickness so off to school she went. Last night, she was up every hour on the hour coughing and hacking, so she's home today and has an appointment with the doctor later on.

It's another blisteringly cold day here in downtown Freezerville. Maryn was supposed to participate in an all-day snow sculpting competition down by the Tridge today, but they canceled it due to cold. I'm glad they did. The two minutes it took us to get from the van into the community center for Avery's basketball game last night made my hands feel as though they were going to break off at the wrist.

Despite the cold, Suzy is out and about. She is meeting with Erin the Great, Linda the Powerful, and Addie the Slobbery at Zehnder's in Frankenmuth this afternoon. One of the things we kept saying over and over when we were in process of making the move to Midland was that it's only an hour and a half from the Detroit suburbs. That means a meeting somewhere in the middle is less than an hour away. I love this aspect of living here. Rather than being a soul-killing six hour drive through Chicago and Crudtown (that's what I like to call Indiana), it's a pleasant hour and a half straight shot to family and friends. That's pretty great.

One nice highlight to my day so far was receiving a Facebook message from my old pal, Jeremy. I've written about Jeremy here before, years ago. He and I were buddies at Idaho State and were both English majors and poetry dorks. Eventually, he went into broadcasting, starting a local show on KISU called InHouse that specialized in playing music by independent and local bands. After graduating, he parlayed that into a show on Oregon Public Radio in Portland. He's been there, promoting bands and playing music, for over seven years. Earlier this week, he posted on FB that he had just been unceremoniously laid off. I dropped him a line to say how much I think that sucks and how much I've admired what he's done over the years. He wrote back today to say thanks and to affirm that, despite the time and distance between us, that we are still pals. That's nice, you know? To know that even after years without much real contact, your friends are still your friends. I love that. It makes cold, snowy days filled with child sickness and doctor appointments much better.

Well, child #1 isn't going to drive herself home from school (though I'm sure some part of her wishes she could), so I'm off to pick her up. Avery and Park Fu will stay here, equally mesmerized by the power of unlimited cartoons on Netflix. They won't even know I'm gone.