Appointment with my advisor

Alternate title: I Am Now Officially Panicked.

This is not the advisor's fault, it's my own. He doesn't seem worried at all. I imagine it's a lot easier to be serene when you're not the one doing the writing. Also he is very cool and laid-back (close to retirement). In a lot of ways what you would imagine a tall, distinguished, well-spoken, tweed-jacket-wearing English university professor to look like.

I went in to see him because he just got back from vacation (he's been gone a month). My plan was to have a 3,000 page literature review ready to hand him. This did not happen, possibly because I was the only one who knew about my great goal, and it turns out that I don't hold myself very accountable. So I told him that I needed him to set me a deadline because I was not doing a good job of it on my own. And if I knew that he knew that there was a deadline I'd be sure to make it, see. He laughed as if that were the funniest thing he'd ever heard.

Dissertation Advisor: But what's the point? I mean, it's not as though I'm going to be cruel to you if you don't meet it.

Me: No! Shhh! Don't say that!

DA: You want me to be cruel to you?

Me: Yes! I want you to be very firm with me, very firm. Also stern. That would be good too.

Yes. I am a closet masochist. The whole thing would have been slightly hot if he hadn't been wiping his eyes from laughing so hard.

Finally he stopped laughing and we talked some more, and he said that a good time to have my lit review complete would be by the end of next week. Of course my eyes lit all up at the prospect of a deadline, at which point he fell back in his chair and laughed some more about Americans and their ways.

I've made a timetable now, starting from the date in September when I want to turn the thing in for binding and then going backwards. I've divided up the weeks & days to devote to each section and included my 4 days in Prague. And . . . it's not pretty. Let's just say that extra faith and prayers would not be unappreciated.

Other things DA told me:

• Don't bother reading books and articles. They cloud your thinking. He never reads.
• Don't read other people's dissertations either.
• Also don't talk to people about what they're doing--they don't matter.
• Recommendations schmecommendations.
• As far as interviews go, I'm on the pig's back and could possibly make an article out of it later.
• As for the rest of it, this is where it gets hard.
• When I'm in Prague, I really should take a while to just sit in a sidewalk cafe.

If I'm still alive by then, I'll probably end up snorting crystallized caffiene off the tabletop at that sidewalk cafe in Prague.