It's 2:40am and I can't sleep. For the last month or so, I've developed the habit of waking up at around 2 or 3 and having trouble falling back asleep. Tonight I woke up after having a very uncomfortable dream about my defense. In my dream, one of my committee members came half hour late, everyone except me drank a ton of coffee, and slowly the attendees of the defense starting picking apart my dissertation. So far, this description probably isn't that far off from how things will really unfold when my defense happens. But, as dreams and nightmares go, things started to get weird.
First, it was another student from the department that did most of the talking in my dream, not my committee members. This student pointed out problems in the text and asked for clarification of certain passages. Other than the fact that it was a student asking all of the questions, it's still not that weird... except for the fact that the passages of my dissertation had strange quotes from Matthew Broderick movies that don't exist. In my dream, I tried defending these passages and pointed to the repetition of I-statements as examples of Grice's Maxims. Broderick was clearly flaunting the maxims of quality and quantity (something that has absolutely nothing to do with my dissertation research whatsoever). In feeling that I was failing miserably, I started singing songs from the made up Broderick hit in order to persuade my committee. It didn't work. Instead they asked me why I submitted total crap. As I flipped through the pages of my dissertation as submitted, I repeatedly saw charts that didn't print right, problems with unicode, copies of magazine articles in the margins and horrible spelling and grammatical errors. It looked like I had never even read the damn thing, and I certainly hadn't made any adjustments based on the comments my committee members had made to previous drafts. Meanwhile, I tried to prove my mastery of linguistic analysis by discussion Hungarian weather terms. After all, the Hungarian term for 'it' in expressions such as "it's raining" makes much more sense than in any language from the Germanic or Italic branch of the Indo-European family (again, this has absolutely nothing to do with my dissertation). Somewhere around this point I woke up, struggled to sit up and make it out of bed so that I could use the bathroom, realized it was just a dream, and completely lost any amount of self esteem I had left inside of me.
Even though I know that it was just a nightmare and my defense will be nothing like this dream (other than the coffee that will be in the room and a committee member might show up late), it doesn't make me want to graduate. I'm trying my hardest to finish writing my last chapters, but I'm not satisfied with my ideas. Today's biggest challenge was keeping myself together emotionally so that I could write an extra inch of text between outbursts. I've yearned to finish a PhD for nearly 10 years and now that it's finally within grasp, I don't know why I want it. On the day of my graduation, I will officially be unemployed. A week later, the medical insurance I obtain for my family will run out. Because my paycheck is technically considered a stipend, I am ineligible for unemployment. Every year of graduate school has resulted in trying to figure out how to pay bills for 3 months without a pay check. This year it's more overwhelming because I have no idea when another paycheck will come, when I will be able to apply for jobs, or when a university might pick me out of 200 other applicants for a job. On top of that, I keep puking and everything around me still has a very unpleasant aroma. Between writing paragraphs to my discussion chapter, I had a phone interview with a county social worker. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised that becoming "Dr. Kelsie" doesn't matter much this week. I also shouldn't be surprised that crazy dissertation defense nightmares involving Matthew Broderick and Hungarian lexical patterns make me cry in the middle of the night. Maybe this is just part of earning a PhD and it will soon be replaced by another equally exhausting factor common to the PhD experience. Either way,sleep is much more appealing than having others address me as "Doctor."
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