MY DISSERTATION IS MAKING ME CRAZY.

Has this ever happened to you?

1. You get a great idea, or rather, you have an idea you've been slobbering over for a few years and you think, hey, why don't I turn this into a dissertation?

2. Your advisor can't quite seem to get your great idea out of the proposal stage. Meanwhile you're one year away from the job market and you still don't have any participants. Or no group of participants, anyway. You have a few scattered speakers of Not-Really-Endangered Language Z but no network means no diss.

3. Your advisor keeps telling you to read stuff. You want to go and find speakers of Not-Really-But-Almost Endangered Language Z so that you can justify even having the dissertation you claim you want to write.

4. At the same time, you are teaching a class in Portuguese (which is a relatively minor language but not Not-Really-But-Could-Be-Within-A-Few-Years Endangered Language Z), you are sort of holding down a household, trying to put pants on your child, who refuses to wear pants except under duress, trying to cook vegetables but often just resorting to fish sticks, and trying to give your husband a reason or two not to just abandon you and preserve his own sanity once and for all. All of which kind of cuts down on the time you should really be working on your dissertation.

5. In a word, argh.

I go to the wilds of Los Angeles tomorrow to find speakers of Not-Really-and-Who-Gives-A- Crap-Anyway Endangered Language Z. Wish me luck because I'm this close to just throwing the whole goddamn plan out the window.