I sent my chapter as promised and then drifted off late watching videos about the Tournamet climb in the Tour de France. I’ll give myself a day to rest from the intense coffee and writing lifestyle of the last couple of weeks, then print off the version 6 chapter to compare against the new agreed […]
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Due to an overwhelmingly stressful family situation, which kept me up all night Friday and Saturday with racing intrusive thoughts, I have deleted my WhatsApp account and disabled the phone and messaging features on my cell phone. I gave my committee a commitment that I would have a complete political opportunities chapter done this weekend […]
I am reminded anew of the general pointlessness of trying to persuade people to do the right thing on the basis of empathy, ethics, reason — and even their own long-term self-interest. Such are our politeness-based codes of social behaviour that you usually get more condemnation for bringing up the transgression than the person making […]
The news nowadays is awfully hard to handle. Tolerance and democracy are at risk in the United States, which poses a grave threat to Canada. The global population is revealing how little it is willing to compromise on basic precautions to protect the vulnerable from COVID and keep the pandemic as managed as possible. In […]
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Some time ago, I wrote a new introductory chapter because my previous issue context and literature context chapters were too long. My committee said they aren’t happy with it and it needs changes, but first I should go through and revise my four core chapters. I have nearly finished that now, with two revised chapters […]
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For weeks or months last January, my ability to focus and be productive was sharply impaired by constant fear about what would happen in the United States. Now it’s the less frightening but far more personal anguish about what will come of the ongoing alt right insurrection in Ottawa. It’s painful because of what it […]
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Today I continued making progress with finishing the shortened and reorganized versions of my four core dissertation chapters. Specifically, I finished my hand edit of the framing chapter, chiefly intended to split out my own prescriptive normative conclusions from analysis of the divestment movement and scholarship about it. This is a particularly challenging task because […]
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I didn’t hit my self-imposed goal of producing 50 page versions of my four core chapters by the end of January, with all comments from two committee members taken into account. Nonetheless, the idea of the deadline served its purpose. Two of the four chapters are now done (except for a last check-through of length […]
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I don’t know exactly why, but the insomnia which has been my normal state of life for as long as I can remember has given over to what’s more like never-ending tiredness: going to bed tired, waking up tired, spending all day tired. It may be from the loss of academic and social non-dissertation activities […]
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Reading Paul Stamets’ Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms: Third Edition, I learned that many fungal species can be cultivated using sterilized paper as a substrate. Since my main PhD task remains cutting down the length of my printed chapter drafts, I have begun setting aside used paper for this purpose rather than recycling. That sets […]
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