The archival thing, for example, is really helpful. More personally, to wax meta about the process, I write in the morning because I can write most clearly when I’m fully rested, but I also sometimes have sleep problems which cause me to wake up at four in the morning when I haven’t gotten nearly enough sleep to write the kind of hyper-compressed and polished prose the dissertation requires. It’s an anxiety thing about writing, I think, which is also self-perpetuating: I need the early-morning, fully-rested thing to write, but that process sometimes causes me to wake up needing-to-write before I’m fully rested (and therefore be unable to get back to sleep because dammitIneedtowrite!!!!!!1111!!!1). Blogging helps me mediate that; I can pick away at little ideas and bits of the dissertation, or chase down random tangents, or just write about whatever, without the pressure of perfection bearing down on me and making the anxiety a thousand times worse (OHMYGOD ILLNEVERGETAJOB UNLESSITSPERFECT ISUCKIHATEMYWRITING,etc)

Of course, the larger thing it does is put me in contact with other people thinking about the same problems, people like y’all, which is one thing the academy is becoming increasingly terrible at doing. So yay!

But yeah, your and Aaron’s blogs have been inspirational in this regard, since they’re engaged largely with each of your work. Many blogs by PhD students–and this isn’t a criticism–often become somehow meta or about the process itself. I write posts like that, too, and my “Humanities Dissertation Project” category itself is made up of those kinds of posts.

I wish, however, that I wrote more posts along these lines: as soon as I found out that “Avatar” opened itself up to strong readings along the lines of empire and race, I knew that I’d be able to look forward to at least one post on the subject between you and Aaron. So I want to figure out what it is about what I’m doing that lends itself to that sort of thing. “Oh, crap, x happened. I wanna know what Moacir has to say!” Then, I think, this silly little page will have found its voice.

Aaron, for example, pretty much seems to do a lot of his heavy lifting on the blog, and I find, in retrospect, that a lot of links/arguments I made on CM helped me maintain the narrative thread in my head (not to mention, serve as an archive) for my “work”.

Basically, when I went on hiatus the first time, I wanted to come back with a blog that reflected/used whatever it was I was doing in grad school. Doing that instead of grad school work, however, quickly became a huge guilt trip. So now I’m trying to figure out a space in the middle, by not, for example, spending 2 days researching a *blog post*.