Back

I'm back from almost a full month away from this blog. Don't make the mistake of thinking that my absence was due to my working hard on the dissertation or class prep. I have a friend who says that June for her is usually a throwaway month in terms of productivity. I think it must be the same for me, partly because it's summertime. Instead of working I spent my June taking care of homestuff and having reunions with family and friends, including several family members and friends whom I see only once every year or year-and-a-half. One of those friends was the first guest ever to spend the night in our house, and it's good to know that our hosting skills are survivable.

Anyway, after re-reading my previous post, I realized that I spoke too soon. Not too long after mildly bemoaning the fact that I don't get much feedback on my work (see #8), I received very generous comments from a friend; I had shared my prospectus draft with her because she had let me read her brilliant, tried-and-true prospectus when I was looking for good examples of prospectuses from a literature department. Her feedback was wholly unexpected as she had been dealing with heavy deadlines to complete the first full draft of her own dissertation (which she succeeded in doing).

I also wanted to note here that I've been appreciating looking at the old stuff in the libes when I've had the occasional chance to do so. In contemporary Filipino American circles, both academic and non, there is a sense, a strong impression, of Filipino invisibility in the U.S., and given this, I experience a thrill at the evidence of a preoccupation with Filipinos in the American popular cultural imaginary, even if such evidence was produced in the first half of the 20th century. But because I can't get inexpensive copies of my own of these texts (photocopying hundreds of pages is not cost-effective), I have to really work to be selective of the things that I type out when I take my notes. And sometimes I'm not too successful at selectivity because who knows what I will eventually need during the writing phase? One of the unexpected results of this is that I sprained my right index finger last month (it's fine now, after a hiatus from intensive typing). I don't want carpal tunnel syndrome from the dissertation. Ay de mí.