For the first time in quite a while, I’m getting excited about my work again. I was feeling good about things at the beginning of this academic year, but the failure to actually propose my dissertation in December like I had wanted, combined with some completely asinine departmental politics during the winter quarer, pretty much destroyed all the motivation I had to do some serious dissertation work this year. Of course, just because I wasn’t working on it doesn’t mean it wasn’t omnipresent, lurking in the recesses of my mind, nagging at me in idle moments (you know, like when you’re trying to fall asleep). But it was clinging to me like a heavy burden, not lingering seductively just out of reach. But now, now I’m starting to feel the old flame rekindle. I’m rembering that the reason I started doing this was because I like the things I study. I may still hate the ostentation and pretention of academia, I may feel my stomach turn at the politicking and patronage that makes it seem like being a grad student is like being courtier during the rule of a particular oppressive and moody monarch, and I may still feel despondent when I think about how I use the word “douchebag” to describe some of my colleagues a thousand times more often than I use the words “brilliant” or “wonderful.” But when I pick up an old psychiatric text and thumb through its pages, when I hear people talk about nosology and etiology, when I read stories about hallucinations and paranoia, when I look at the statististics from a nineteenth century asylum… I feel it again. I feel that little twinge of delight and giddiness; that desperate urge to read more and then talk about it with others. I guess what I’m saying is that even after all these years of disillutionment and frustration, monomania still turns me on. Hot! :-D

Other hot things coming soon: reviews of Pandora’s Box and Robot Monster