Two days (and one more sad sunset) later and the chapter is finished. It was anticlimactic. I sent it off and then I emptied the dishwasher and made a salad, which I ate while sitting on the floor and talking to Anna as she cooked. I only have two more to write, and one of them is short. And then begins the editing. 

I will miss this project when it is over. I won't miss it enough to want to do it again, but I will miss it, despite the large quantities of panic, and the increasing frustration now that we are in the final weeks. There are moments where being caught up in a writing project just seems so very right. Where the words come easily. Even if those words are "nonprobabilistic purposive sampling." Today was like that, a day of enjoying language enough to forget about the outcome, of losing hours to the stringing together of ideas, following the leaps of them. 

I know xanga won't be around much longer. I've long been so fickle about writing here, and I'm okay with the thought that my blog will be gone soon. But, despite so much absence, lately these little shouts into the internet are nice, and necessary. This is a strange time. I'm glad for whoever might still be reading here. I have loved this place so. 

h. 

I am letting the sun set on an unfinished chapter, and I am discouraged. I have been working on this one for too long, and it isn't hard - I am just tired, scattered, and worried. July is the month in which everything happens. This entire document needs to be finished in just over three weeks. I tell myself over and over that it will be fine, and it will be - I am on schedule, everything is going very smoothly, and there is no reason to panic. But I do panic. There is so much to remember, to think about, and what if what if. Increasingly I wake up ill, with a lurching stomach and a tight chest. I tell myself it is is not reasonable or helpful to be so worried - because it isn't, and this will all get done - but my body doesn't listen.  

I like this work. I've been saying it all along, and it is always true, but holy crap.

h. 

There is something about academic work that makes me positively ache for creative escapes. It isn't that I don't find my thesis creative in its own way - it is, and I am invested in making it not just good, or smart, but also beautiful. But it is not the same - too stuffed into headings and subheadings and packaged in a different vocabulary, concerned with a different kind of precision. 

Anyway - this afternoon, on the downswing of a particularly volatile encounter with my own, crazy panic, I read "A History of Weather" by Billy Collins. It is online at Poetry Magazine. (I would post it here but that might be illegal. Is there a rule about reproducing these things? This is probably something I should know.) I am forever searching the world for things that match my inner landscape. Something about reading poems, in these moments, feels right, feels like a good answer to so many internal hills and valleys. Whatever sound is echoing from either place really ought to be something beautiful. 

Anyway, I think you should read it. It is very, very good.  

h.