9 Week Philosophy

First, thanks for the kind notes yesterday. I am unfortunately a little sick and my body needed that rest more than I realized. Dr. J is now officially back in his UniversityTown and I am of course sad. With his semester and the end of my diss underway, I have no idea when I'll see him again. It could be over a month. Sigh.

Dr. J went to dinner with my mother and I last night. It was nice except that my mother expressed her usual skepticism about my work. That kinda sucked. I brushed it off for the rest of the evening, but as Dr. J and I debriefed later he shared with me his thoughts....

Remember back in grade school, we did everything in nine week periods--wrote papers, memorized science, took math tests, read literature and history, did many after school activities, etc. And we did it all in nine weeks at a time. We never thought that was a short amount of time. It was always rushed but just enough time.

That really put the May graduation deadline into perspective for me, and I appreciate Dr. J just tellin me that he believed I could do it. It was needed after my mother's usual pessimism about everything that I do. So despite my sadness today after Dr. J left, I got some good work done at the library on those sources I needed for Chapter One. The bad thing about being at such a big library though is that I found a lot of extra books just browsing around. So I ran out of time and didn't get to about five books I really needed to look at. I may have to go back and get those tomorrow. Yeah, I will, because I need to make some copies for Chapter Five as well.

In the end, I spent 3.5 hours at HBU library this afternoon, and I'll probably work from now until the Rose Bowl comes on. Or maybe I'll just watch the second half. Either way, football will be my break for the evening. Hopefully I can get this Chapter One close to going out before then, if not completely finished.