Please, please can I just move into my dissertation phase?!?

45 minutes until my Internet and Civic Disengagement course. Just finished rereading a few chapters from Joe Trippi's book for class discussion, which again got me *massively* excited. Class today is going to be great.

It's an interesting juxtaposition, though. I spent the morning advising PSCI students on their midterm essays. It felt a lot like senior year at Oberlin, running those gigantic tutoring sessions and staying up for 11 hours helping people with their papers. Loved it. Then I worked on Internet stuff, which is what I eventually want to research. Loved it, and had 40 ideas that I would like to address further. After class, I'll have to drop it all and read almost a whole book on structural realism in about 4 hours. Death.

Once I'm through the dissertation phase, I'll be spending a lot more time with the first two. Once that's over, my profession will be the first two. The third one only runs from now through late August. It's not that I'll never read anything I don't like again, but my reading will be related to my research agenda -- either moving it upward or outward -- and that is where I honestly think I'm at my best.

On another note, I got back on to the pokerroom site this week while I was recovering, and again yesterday during a tv break from my reading. Finally cashed out again, for the first time this month. That's +$3,750 lifetime. I genuinely believe if I dropped grad school today, I could make $2,000/month playing cards. And that wouldn't be a bad life -- I sure don't think I'd end up writing posts about how the lifestyle was "killing me." But economically it would be a stupid move, b/c I can do almost as well as a grad student on fellowship if I make $500/month playing cards, which is a realistic goal for on-the-side play at this point. So I'll keep going through hell now, get better at cards, and by the time I'm good enough at cards that I could make a lot more doing that, I ought to be into my dissertation phase and actually ENJOYING academia again.

'kay, break time is over. Oh, I also need to work on my setlist for tonight. DJing again at the local swing dance. Sooooo glad I've started doing that again.