I woke up angry this morning. Angry that someone else did the same research as me. Angry that I didn't find out about it sooner. Angry that I had to read another thesis before writing anything. Angry that I have to start teaching again in 2 weeks but I still have 2 chapters to write if I want to meet my goal. Angry that I have to rewrite my abstract again, and angry that I'm not going to meet my chapter goal. And then I got over it (riding a horse and an acupuncture appointment helped).
I checked in with a librarian today to help me find the 1981 thesis. It turns out that no library in the world has a copy of it because it was never published. This means I'm not in the dog house for not knowing about this research. Instead, I get to write about this other guy's work and explain how mine is similar, but still contributes more to the general discussion of lexical typology and semantic change (my research topics). The library gave me the e-mail address for the researcher who has been causing me grief for the last 24 hours. At first, I thought I wouldn't e-mail him because I didn't want to read another thesis. If it wasn't published, I'm not responsible for it, right? And then I got over myself and decided I had a few questions about the chapter I read last night, so I e-mailed him anyways. I introduced myself, explained my research, and asked a bunch of questions. This is exactly why I didn't want to become an academic when I started graduate school: the fear that some day someone would contact me with questions about something I wrote 20+ years ago. Now that I own a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, my opinion has changed. Go ahead, ask me questions. I certainly will contact you and ask you questions if you wrote something that's not clear. I do it all the time (and sometimes I get responses). This is almost like sending fan mail to a movie star. Only in academia we don't get autographed headshots. Instead, we get to cite someone in our paper with "personal correspondence". With any luck I will get a response by this weekend and still have time to change my abstract before submitting it on Monday.
In general, I feel better about my dissertation than I did last night. It is not as gloom and doom as I thought it would be. There are plenty of differences between my work and this other guy's, and now I have someone else to cite and blame my ideas on. (It's always nice to be able to blame someone else for one's own ideas when another questions them.)
To get my mind off of the additional work I have ahead of me, I read my e-mail. My friend sent me a call for applications to a program called Breath of Life. Some of my friends have participated in this program in the past and it sounds like a lot of fun, so I applied. If selected, I'll spend 2 weeks in DC working with American Indians on a language revitalization project. At first, the application looked really short and it didn't require references, so I decided to apply today. Then, after selecting "linguist" instead of "American Indian", the application became longer and I had to provide more information (included references). I should have stopped there and talked to my references first, but I just wrote down the contact information for two of my committee members and e-mailed them after the fact. I'm not sure how they'll feel about that, but oh well. I decided to be impulsive for once. Maybe I'll have something fun to do after defending my dissertation this spring and add another line to my CV before applying for jobs. (PS, one of my references just e-mailed me and wrote "what a great opportunity!" I guess she doesn't mind)
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