Firsts

Tomorrow I’m meeting with my supervisor to discuss my dissertation proposal. I have not thoroughly looked through my dissertation proposal since last spring when I begrudgingly wrote it for a Doctoral Forum class I could not stand. It was dry, organized and written to fit predetermined criteria. I took a gander while writing my paper for CAA (College Art Association) 2014, but otherwise, I have been so busy with everything but it. An article on sentio-tactics is going to be published in July. An interview I did was published this month in NoMorePotLucks, and another interview with Laura Portwood-Stacer is going up in May on the Books Aren’t Dead podcast series as part of Fembot. Some other life-changing events also happened.

This is it. There’s no turning back. I only have funding for five years (until May 2016) and this has to get done. Sometime in between a baby has to be conceived (by immaculate conception at this point, but if it can happen in a Murakami novel, why can’t it happen to me?!) The thing all my grad student new mom friends tell me is that these soft cuddly little humans sleep a lot. And it’s not like PhD students keep regular sleeping schedules as it is. I can’t attempt baby making in the midst of my late 30s and trying to find jobs. But for now, my dissertation. Going through the motions of the PhD normalizes the experience & then I remember, oh yea, i’m doing a motherfucking PhD & i get to read philosophy & shove my awesomeness down the throats of the teachers that didn’t think I’d amount to anything (did I just paraphrase a Biggie lyric?). It’s been almost three years since I travelled across two provinces in a giant truck with too many belongings. Now my arms are spread open to welcome this opus. The holy grail of Magda’s ideas, thoughts, theories, words, movements and affects — Women’s Amateur Online Self-Imagining, 1996–2001: historicizing feminist (conceptual) photography and the internet before social media. (Working title obv. It’s way too short to be a legit PhD thesis title!)