M.I.C
Missing in Comps
Photo Credit: Patrick Tomasso @impatrickt unsplash
January. The month of resolutions. The month when we look outside from our warm, cozy, element-free homes (to a degree) and look into the sunless 7:30 am sky, snow racing across it (not down!) and say, “I’m going to the gym,” or “I am going to eat better,” or “F@k this, I’m going back to bed.” For me, it’s another attempt to be consistent with this blog. Six months have passed since my last post when I wandered about in Athens, absorbing the history, the archaeology, and the food. I ate a lot!
I feel that I have made these statements before. I will post more. I will write more this year—blog at least once a week. Yet, here I am, blogging for the first time in six months. There is a caveat here; I am trying to complete my Comps (Comprehensive Exams). This is the phase during your Ph.D. when you lose all hope and despair fills your body like a lead weight that slowly, silently poisons your body until you feel nothing evermore. In other words, it is the point where you sit in front of a committee and demonstrate that you read 80-100 scholarly books, articles and relevant materials and know all the theories, methodology, and arguments that are presented in said readings and demonstrate their applicability to inform, and where their gaps are, for your upcoming proposed proposal and dissertation.
Fun Stuff.
So, the question becomes, what is different about this year than the last? Well, I dunno, but what little I do know is that Bill Caraher’s blog is inspiring me to do better. Archaeology of the Mediterranean World is a wonderful read. I believe Caraher posts almost every day during the early morning; this is when I get my email notification of a new post. He takes a few days off here and there, but they are seldom. This is the dedication I want.
How do I proceed? Maybe I should try to get up early and write something, anything, whether it’s 100 words or 500, first thing in the morning with coffee in hand. I could draw from my obsidian vault (a program that uses markdown text for note-taking and knowledge creation), which I use for my Comps, as it has a lot of writing prompts from the past year. Hmmm? This is a good start, so let’s end this on a positive note. I do need to finish writing for my Comps. Positive note expired.