Time-Wasting Experimental Blog Post

Why on earth would I spend two hours trying to fix my blog so the archives show on the side where they belong, instead of at the bottom where no one can find them? I have no idea. I don't know why I should care about this, but I do. It's not as if I expect anyone to read this blog--it was created purely as a motivational tool for myself, so that I could practice writing and hopefully learn to enjoy it.

So, the purpose of this particular post is so that I can see whether Blogger simply didn't like my previous entry, about progress and bad days, or whether it doesn't like anything I write. Whatever happens, no matter how badly my page is messed up, I will force myself to abandon, at least for this evening, the silly task of trying to fix my unread blog.

Instead, I will watch the first lesson from the Remedial Swimming video I just received from eBay, then go to the gym to try it out. I can go play guilt-free, because I already kept my writing appointment for the day!!

Update: The reason I spent over 2 hours trying to fix a blog no one reads is that I am too dumb, proud, or something, to scroll through the Blogger help forums to see if anyone else has ever had the same problem. Once I did that, I discovered the culprit was a stray </div>. Once it was obliterated, not only did my archives come running back home, but all the links, stubbornly unclickable in Firefox, magically came to life. If my time-wasting resulted in a lesson learned, then it wasn't totally wasted...hopefully I learned my lesson. Here, I got two lessons for the price of one: a Remedial HTML lesson, and a Read the Tech Help lesson. Thank you, Blogger techies!

Progress = Redefining Bad Days

After a couple weeks of excellent writing progress, I’ve fizzled…or at least, my momentum has lessened. When things were going well, I could easily spend at least a couple consecutive hours writing, generating and editing quite a few paragraphs, enjoying it at least somewhat, and feeling pretty good about what I’d written. The last week or so, the paragraphs have been painful to come by. Sometimes I have found myself watching the clock, in hopes that the slow-moving writing minutes would slide by a little more quickly.

The beginning of my good writing stretch coincided with my resolution to work on my dissertation four hours each day (it is a full-time job, after all!). Some of the bad writing days occurred when, due to circumstance or poor planning, I did not get in my 4 hours, or I waited until 10:00 p.m. to start, resulting in an even more screwed-up sleep schedule than usual and decreasing the probability of doing well the next day.

However, this rough writing patch has served to point out just how far I have really come. My last few bad writing days have each still resulted in over an hour of actual writing!! Wow! A few months ago, a lousy writing day was actually a no-writing day, surrounded on either side by 7 other no-writing days. And a lousy dissertation day, instead of being a day in which all I do is read a couple articles or organize my references, was a hiding-from-my-dissertation day in which I made no progress at all. (Actually, I’m convinced that a no-dissertation-work day is actually a negative-progress day…if I stay away from it for even a day, I lose touch with my train of thought and plans for my study, and I have to go backwards when I restart.)

We recently spent a weekend in Corpus Christi for a mini-vacation (yes, I worked on my dissertation and maintained my writing streak in the hotel room). One afternoon, I went for a run on the seawall jogging trail. Expecting to get in 5 miles, I found myself totally wiped out after less than 2. I was hot and miserable, and the whole thing just felt like it was uphill (it wasn’t, flat as a pancake). I started taking walk breaks at 2 miles, and whenever I started running again, it didn’t last long. Eventually I gave it up and walked back to the hotel, feeling pretty unhappy about my lack of discipline, and having serious second thoughts about letting Dave Mows Grass talk me into the Winslow Half-Marathon next month. According to the technology genie on my wrist, I went 4 miles before turning it off, but I’m sure I only ran 3 of those.

The more I thought about it, the less discouraged I became. Hey, I just ran three-fourths of a 4-mile stretch of sun-baked concrete, no shade, at 95ºF, and who-knows-how-high humidity. Three years ago, would I have ever dreamed I could do such a thing? Heck, I couldn’t run to the end of the block! So this bad day, far from being cause for hopelessness, is actually a miraculous victory.

When I have a really bad day, whether it involves writing, running, losing my temper, or whatever, I need to remember where I started. If the current bad day looks better than the good days once looked, then I’m on the right track. (I’m sure the reverse is also true…if the current good days look worse than the bad days used to look, something probably needs to change.)

One more thing: guess what happened the very next day after the aborted run on the seawall? Scott dropped me off at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, and I ran 11 miles back to the hotel! And enjoyed most of it!

In spite of a few bad writing days, my writing streak now numbers 31 days, exactly 15.5 times longer than my previous longest writing streak. And while today was not a great day dissertation-wise, as I spent a good chunk of it being a lazy bum, I still got in over an hour of productive writing. Even better, I didn’t mind doing it, and quit while I still had some momentum. Hopefully that will carry over into tomorrow’s session.

So, well-wishing friends, remember that we all need to think long-term trajectory, not short-term current state. If we catch each other wanting to give up because of a bad day, or a bad week, let’s remind each other just how far we’ve come! (Of course, sometimes a well-placed kick in the rear is in order instead, but that’s a topic for another day.)

My Theory of Dissertation Momentum

A couple weeks ago, I was really excited about my progress. I was consistently working 4-6 hours each day, including at least a couple hours of writing, and mostly enjoying it. I actually felt there was hope for me as an academic writer. Then, everything slowed down. It became hard to write even a paragraph. I’ve been keeping at it, and have been writing each day, but it isn’t fun lately, and I’m feeling frustrated. So, instead of despairing, I reminded myself that this entire dissertation journey is an experiment, with n = 1, and I went about the task of analysis.

In part, I attribute my decreased writing momentum to the fact that I’m working on a different section of my paper, one I enjoy less. I have devised a theoretical model of how the process will work: for each section, I’ll struggle at the beginning, just getting it organized and off the ground. Then hopefully, I’ll get some momentum and go faster. Then I’ll run out of steam on that part and it will go slow again (by the time I got done writing about propensity scores, I was sick and tired of writing about statistical analysis, and so found it very difficult to dredge up enthusiasm to explain my logistic regression and chi-squared procedures.) It’s like pushing off from the wall in swimming or pushing a sled across the snow—you start from a standstill, then get some momentum and pick up speed, then the momentum dies and you have to start over. Only time will tell if my model is supported by actual practice, but it sure makes sense!

If I think of my dissertation rate of progress as a function of time, there is no reason to expect it to be constant. There is also no reason to think it will be an increasing function, in which I get better and better, and progress gets faster and faster. So, since I don’t expect an upward trajectory, I shouldn’t get down when I hit an occasional low spot, as long as progress is continuing. I need to learn to distinguish the occasional low spot, which is no cause for alarm, from an actual quitting/fizzling, which would indeed be a bad thing.  

I suspect that writing progress will be a series of peaks and troughs. Screwtape, in his Letters VIII and IX, describes the Law of Undulation and warns junior tempter Wormwood to never let his human suspect that peaks and troughs are a normal part of the spiritual journey (C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 1961). According to Screwtape, the Law of Undulation applies to every area of life, including interest in work and affection for friends. He doesn’t specifically mention writing, but I am sure it applies there too. Screwtape says that the best growth (from our perspective and God's, not Screwtape’s!) actually occurs in the troughs. If that’s the case with writing, I should be in great shape!

I’m streaking!!!

I know it’s hard to believe, but this expert writing avoider has now written for at least 30 minutes on 17 consecutive days. At first, I didn’t want to call it a “writing streak” even to myself, much less announce it on a public blog. I don’t believe in jinxes, but I knew how humiliated I would feel if my writing streak fizzled out and died right after I told all my friends about it. Once I cracked the 2-week mark, I started to feel I might be able to keep it up.

I realized that if I were going to track a writing streak, I needed a good definition. It drives me batty when people write about a construct without clearly defining it. I knew there should be a minimum requirement for a writing day to count as part of a streak….five minutes of writing just wouldn’t cut it. The United States Running Streak Association defines a running streak as running “at least one continuous mile each calendar day under one’s own power”, then clarifies some details, including the legality of prosthetic devices and the illegality of crutches and pools. When I read that a running streak doesn’t even count until it reaches a year in length, I was dismayed—I had been pretty proud of my 18 miles across three consecutive running days over the weekend. When I found out they were worthless as a running streak, I decided there was no point trying to add to it and I might as well laze on the couch for a few days.

If there is a United States Writing Streak Association, I didn’t find it. Perhaps it exists, but is just not sufficiently popular to make it to the front of the search pages. Thus I was left to my own devices for a writing streak definition. In keeping with the spirit of the running streak definition, I felt the writing requirement needed to be sufficiently stringent that it would accomplish something worthwhile, yet reasonable and not so demanding as to be unrealistic. Rather arbitrarily, I settled on 30 minutes. If I were trying to maintain a running streak (which I’m not!), it would probably take me about 30 minutes to squeeze in a mile, counting clothes-changing and post-run shower, if I ran out the front door instead of going to a nice running place. Knowing my night-owl tendencies, I opted to define the day as ending whenever I went to bed, regardless of which date is actually on the calendar. Thus if I write at 2:00-2:30 a.m. Thursday morning, that counts as Wednesday writing. The 30 minutes has to be “pretty much continuous” (how’s that for a clear definition?), meaning that it’s okay to pause and scratch my head occasionally, or look up a reference, or to read a bit of an article and then write about it, as long as the primary activity is still writing. If the session morphs into a reading or database-searching session, it now qualifies as non-writing dissertation activity and doesn’t count as part of the writing streak.One more very important note: Only dissertation-related writing counts for the streak or gets put in my writing log. Recreational writing, such as this blog, doesn't count!!

After I officially defined what must occur to add a day to my writing streak, I looked at my writing log, and was disappointed to find out that the first three days of my streak had dropped off. Day 3 was only 28 minutes, so my alleged streak had to start over from 1. I briefly considered changing the definition so I could get my three days back, but thought better of it. Researchers are not allowed to change their hypotheses after the experiment is underway. So what I thought was a 20-day writing streak became a 17-day writing streak. That’s okay. When I created a spreadsheet formula to add a writing streak column to my writing log, guess what I discovered was my previous record for a writing streak?  To my shame, it was 2 days. Yes, a lousy 2 days is the best I had ever managed since I started the writing log a little over a year ago, when I went to my first writing workshop. I knew I had been terribly inconsistent, but I really expected to find some several-day streaks in there.

Oh well, there’s no point in lamenting over the past. All I can do now is go forward. Hopefully the current streak will go for a while. I’m glad I decided to count it as a streak now instead of waiting for a year like the running streak people!

Remedial Swimming

Yes, I still cannot believe it, but I actually enrolled in Remedial Swimming. That is not the official name given to it by the swim/scuba business, but that is what it is. I refuse to call it Developmental Swimming or Transitional Swimming, as if it were a math or English class offered by an institution of higher learning. Such euphemisms have no place in this blog. The only reason I signed up for it is because my friend Yegan (who also teaches developmental math) talked me into it. Once again, I discover I am just like my students—I am going to school simply because my friends are! (Gee, we’re all humans…why shouldn’t we be alike?) Actually, while being able to share lessons with a friend is a nice plus and is the reason I chose this particular summer to learn to swim, it is in fact something I have considered before, because I always wished I could swim, but as with so many other things, I’ve just never gotten around to it.

I have managed (at least mostly) to get over my ego and not feel self-conscious about my total lack of skill in this area. I am even willing to practice in the lap pool at my gym, splashing around the shallow end and coughing up water, while other people gracefully swim lap after lap, or sit on the bench in front of the steam room talking (I’m sure they have more interesting things to talk about than the ineptitude of people in the pool). There is nothing whatsoever wrong with being enrolled in Remedial Swimming, or Remedial Anything (at least that’s what I keep telling myself). Remedial Anything simply means that you did not learn Anything at the time Anything is typically learned, so you have to learn it later. I have known outstanding students, excelling in calculus and above, who began their college careers in developmental math. Every time I teach a developmental math class, I remind myself that I may have a few future rocket engineers in the bunch, who are way smarter at math than me. I wonder if it has ever occurred to my Remedial Swimming instructor that perhaps Yegan or I will be a future Olympic swimming champ?

Yegan started Remedial Swimming at least a couple of weeks before me (talking me into it was a difficult and time-consuming project). She said that she was absolutely terrible at swimming, sank like a rock, and flailed her arms and legs without going anywhere. So I thought I would be ahead of her, because at least I could float on my back and dog-paddle across the short length of the pool. But this apparent head start did me no good whatsoever, because on my first day of class, the instructor didn’t ask me to dog-paddle across the pool or float on my back. She asked me to lay horizontally on the water with my face in it, and kick my legs. On the second lesson, she added arms. I am supposed to stroke through the water with my arms, turning my head to breathe with each stroke, all while continuously kicking my legs and staying horizontal. This is, of course, impossible. I have never even been able to pat my head and rub my stomach at the same time. How could I possibly move my arms one way, my legs another, and my head another, all while laying face-down in a substance that has been known to kill people? As I discovered last night, I cannot even run on a treadmill while watching Xtreme Skateboarding (whenever a skateboarder wipes out at the top of the halfpipe, I step off the side of the treadmill).

Remedial Swimming Lesson #3 is tomorrow. We shall see what it holds. After upping her Remedial Swimming attendance to four times a week, Yegan can now swim halfway across the lap pool without stopping. I am only attending Remedial Swimming once a week, so it may take me until Christmas to be able to swim across the pool. I certainly hope not—I don’t think my ego can take a beating for that long!