Finishing School

It sometimes seems that I am nothing but a seething mass of rough edges. This is not without considerable charm, but it certainly makes for many frustrating social encounters. A bit more polish here and there would, I keep hoping, reduce the seething pains of budding conversations.

But polish is not merely a matter of having smoothness, for the over-smooth descends quickly into the slick where it is all too easy to stumble. To be real to most people requires that it is at least conceivable that there are circumstances in which one does not know just the right thing to do and does not do it. Silk flowers do not bruise, but their scent leaves much to be desired.

A crucial component of amiability, the virtue Jane Austen has taught me to cherish, is self-assurance. One thing the amiable person does well is set others at their ease, and there is a certain kind of ease which one cannot produce unless one is comfortable in one's skin, one's social position, and one's range of both physical and social motion.

As my memories of my dissertation proposal day grow faint, and yet I must still attend to the dissertation, I've found that a certain lack of self-assurance has settled over me greater than should be due to the lack of progress alone. Dissertations are one of those projects that, strung out, simply enervate. As one professor said: the purpose of a dissertation is to be done. If the doing takes too long, all sense of purpose becomes diminished. After all, the disseration is to be one's master-piece, literally -- it is the work which demonstrates (to the satisfaction of a group of masters) that one is a master of one's field.

(This is in contrast to one's magnum opus. Another professor remarked to me that it would be sad if one's disseration (masterpiece) was one's best work (magnum opus). Ahem. Over the years, I've spent much time hoping that he did not mean that comment to be specifically directed toward me.)

However, at least in my case, I had a smallish accomplishment that has reinvigorated and reassured me. I finally signed off on a chapter for an anthology. Well, I sorta signed off. Okay, handed in a slightly messy, supposed to be final, fairly overdue draft of a chapter to my long suffering editor.

Boy, does it feel good. I'm ready to take on the world again!

Or, at least, my dissertation! Maybe. A little bit. Sometime soon.

Well, okay, maybe I'll just be writing a whole lot more for Monkeyfist.