I like my job

It's about time I wrote here again, lest my bajillions of readers shift their attention elsewhere and are lost to me forever. I sense I may have passed that point. I don't know why I haven't been here much lately - not for lack of wanting, nor of things to say, more that I just didn't want to collect my thoughts, preferring instead to leave them jumbled in my mind to fester and morph into something coherent of their own accord. Much like ignoring the disaster that is my desk. If I put my mind to it, I really can ignore these things. The desk will clean itself.

Well, that never works. I had started this 'essay' about Stephane Dion and the writing of history (most interesting, trust me!) but then you know how on top of the news you have to be before it's irrelevant and, well, 'on top' is just not where I was at all. Maybe this thing will bob to the surface months from now, having taken a different shape. By itself.

Thesis approach follows suit: abandoned in the back of my mind, left to figure itself out - which, happily, it kind of has, as of an hour ago. I haven't finished my thesis yet because I honestly could not connect the dots - from purpose to lit review to the three phases of research to the link back to planning - I just could not find a common thread to tie it all together. Saying that I'd abandoned it is not entirely true, though. I have been picking away at it most days in an attempt to keep some contact with it before I lost it entirely, but always with uncertainty about where the whole thing would end up. I feel clearer now. Work, of all things, has helped.

First, we had a writing workshop last month, which totally inspired me to take a new approach to writing, focusing far more on planning than I normally would. That put a whole new perspective on how to tackle the mountain of the half-analysed, half-written, all-complicated thesis.

Then, for the past week I've been working closely with my co-worker Gavin on a 'project charter' - a new term to me. In case you are as unaware as I was, this is a document that outlines the parameters of a project (spoken with authority!) and has very specific components, like Scope, and Risks, and Milestones. The process of poring through each section and writing the whole thing together on one computer was truly fulfilling. Our boss' boss' boss was happy with the result and so were we. I have always thought of myself as actively NOT a team player (my resume lies) but after this, I'm happy to work closely with Gavin, especially because this approach is how we both finally came to understand what we're about to do.

I've heard lots of reasons not to start a full-time job before finishing a thesis, but so far it's only helped me. Nearly every day at work I come across something that applies, something that brings me closer to tying it all together. Work helps me to look at my thesis more broadly, which is what I need to do. It gives me more energy, not less.

So this morning, when I woke up at 2:00am thinking about my thesis, I got up. I came into this room. It smelled like Christmas because B and I had bought a tree and left it in here to thaw. I wrote my ideas down as a kind of map. I think I'll go back to bed now.