Working Weekend, Tiny Pumpkins

It was another "working weekend", which is why I've been so slow to post about it. I spent most of it...er, working. First I spent a lot of hours translating a thing of mine into Chinese. Several hours = less than a page. Slow slow work. Cut the thing down some more. Translated some more. Gave up in weariness.

Some where in there I got an e-mail from my advisor which had me floored. It said something like, "I've talked to the Director of Graduate Studies and we both agree that you should stay in China another year. E-mail this that and the other person (culmination with the dean), we'll back you up with the funding."

To which my first reaction was, "not on your f---ing life!" though of course I didn't write that.

Some of you are surprised and impressed by how well I am doing here. I know I am. But that doesn't mean it's a comfortable existence. I'm lonely and I miss Colin and rain and ovens. I miss freedom of speech, and talking in English, and pastries with real butter instead of gross butter-flavored vegetable product. I miss olive oil in cooking. I miss seeing only 10 other people on the street rather than hundreds. I don't know--I'm just homesick. Already.

By the way, today (Tuesday, not the weekend I'm blogging about) is my 100th day in Beijing. One hundred down, only (approximately) 240 left to go.

There are a lot of great things about Beijing. I talk about those a lot. But a year is enough!

Somehow my advisor had phrased it in such a way that I felt like explaining any of this would be perceived as directly disregarding his sage advice. I thought about for a whole day, feeling pretty miserable, and then drafted a very carefully worded e-mail, which I sat on overnight, had Colin help me edit, and sent in the morning, cc'd to the DGS.

Now I feel a little silly, having received friendly if mildly puzzled e-mails from both the profs. I think that the original e-mail was supposed to have been more about congratulating me for getting so well set up here and offering support to extend if desired--rather than ordering me to stay. I was just being over-sensitive, huh. Or my advisor made it seem that way as a way of backing off.

Well, no more about this.

Sunday morning I woke up early and full of unaccustomed clarity. So that's why I've been feeling off-track with my dissertation. I spent about half an hour writing and rewriting a sort of "statement of renewed purpose." Only half an hour, but a half an hour of really clear thinking is worth hours of fumbling around.

Various e-mails, reading blogs, posting comments.

I spent the rest of the day making cosmetic revisions on the chapter I've just completed, wrestling it back into line with my renewed sense of purpose. Definitely still has a long way to go, and may need to be completely rewritten (drastically cut?), but at least the cosmetic revisions give a sense of what I want it to be doing, even if there are a lot of tangents along the way. Then I sent the chapter out to two professors.

Finally, I worked on the other translation, the one into English. I was just recopying a table, but also doing some library searches on the stuff in the table at the same time. It was about all my brain was fit for at this point.

Oh yes, and I guess I made it out to campus for dinner and a tiny bit of Christmas shopping. Nothing very much, and it'll probably all arrive late, but I'm doing my best.

The work stuff all sounds so vague, it must be kind of boring to read. But hey, that was the weekend. I have at least tried to make it more interesting by adding pictures of tiny pumpkins. I actually took these yesterday. They have such an eerie autumnal feeling, dead but colorful. I really like them!