Down the track

My long-term aim: I look forward to the day I finish my dissertation so that I can do more blogging.

Day job: Trying not to blog.

Current status: I'm into my Lit Review chapter re-write and enjoying it.

Slow down therapy

Today's advice to myself: You will resent less when you rush less. Cut your list of 'have to' jobs in half. And then in half again.

Day job: Slow down therapy.

Current status: A clear mind means I can see things the way they really are. An open heart means being true to myself, not to someone else, like my supervisor.
I look forward to writing today.

Housekeeping

Story so far: I did housekeeping today. First I sorted, put away and threw away the icons, folders and files on my computer desktop. Now I cans see the bird in my background picture. Next I tackled the files and manila folders in the groaning drawers of my metal filing cabinet. They dated back to the 1980s. Some represented happy times that I clung to. Others still bore traces of the pain and suffering I had endured to collect, collate and read them. They didn’t just contain obsolete information. They were connected to my deepest psyche, filed in my heart and soul. Out they went. I slammed them into the wheelie bin before the university board gets a chance to slam my thesis. I must destroy all those references so they can never again creep into my chapter drafts, not even while I’m sleeping at night. What a relief it is to shift into the present.

Day job: Writing in the morning. Walking in the afternoon. Reading at night.

Need to know: I will only use references from the last five years in my thesis - that means anything with a year starting with 2-0-0.

Star quality: I can survive adversity. I can write. I have published one book and many journal articles.

Current status. I’m up-to-date. I’ve started re-writing my lit review chapter. The sentences are shorter. It will be no more than 20 pages long . If I write 3 pages a day it should take about a week. How good is that?

Most liveable city

Survey: Conducted by a Washington-based group and written up in our weekend newspaper.

World's most expensive cities: New York, London, Paris and Geneva. Indicator used: the cost of housing. Our wealthiest relatives live in London and Geneva so those results make sense to me.

World's most liveable cities: Melbourne, Seattle and Vancouver. Indicators used: lots of cafes and restaurants, close to CBD, tree cover, proximity to coast, good transport, low crime rate. I'm glad I live in one of these.

Consequences: At least I'm in a good place conducive to writing. I must say I never see the beach or CBD, but I do go for a walk to get a cuppaccino for my breaks.

Healing strategy No. 2

Distraction. I was totally engrossed in the novel I read in the last few days. Luckily I was able to get through some of my transcribed interviews and re-code the participant identifiers into question-and-answer codes. Ten down, forty to go.

The novel: ‘Fire Fire’ by Eva Sallis, is a must-read for anyone with a troubled childhood. I know Eva’s uncle so the book had a really strong impact on me. She based it on her own life story. Set in the Australian bush of the Adelaide hills her musically brilliant family starts off as living an idyllic life away from the hustle and bustle of mainstream materialism. Her artistic mother takes the seven children on a wholesome alternative lifestyle journey from love and nature to squalor, debauchery and violence. It’s beautiful, shocking, disturbing and all true.
Check out the author's site
Eva Sallis award-winning Australian author

Personal insight: That novel made me reflect on the last ten years of my life. How did it pass quickly? Those years swallowed my dissertation work, made it obsolete. It’s as if I’ve just woken up from strange dream. I suddenly understand why my supervisor thinks everything I wrote is so dated. She insists I ditch half of it or the examiners will slam my work. My self-revelation is both a shock and a relief. Eva’s book has moved me forward just enough to know how to tackle that chapter I have to re-write. I think I can do it.

Healing strategy No. 1

My current state: Asthmatics can’t go bike riding. The minky blanket on the couch curled itself around me. Illness makes a person regress. I became my own mother and nurtured my sick inner child.

Movie of my choice: I watched A Good Woman on DVD. It's our current version of Oscar Wilde’s 1892 play Lady Windermere’s Fan. If seen as a cheesy film for older girls it’s harmless. What shocked me was connection between snobbish 19th century London society and 21st century upper-middle-class-urban life in Damascus. I remembered those elegantly-rigid Damascene lounge rooms from the casual objectivity of my Western life where nobody cares how we dress or what we say. I missed the sit-up-straight scrutiny where there’s always someone watching and gossiping about what they think they’re seeing. When I was over there my children told me I was different. I knew how to play the game. My scrutineers were never quite sure what they were seeing. The movie had an air of sadness and playfulness. That's what it's like in Damascus.

My writing tasks: Replaced by healing today.

Sliding back to good health

Distraction: I can’t write. Spending time with my sick daughter meant playing gentle bouncing animations.
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my girl's games

I have to be careful not to get sucked into the lovely teen world of anime. Its musical tracks are pearls of soundrops plopping into the pond of my inner meditation. There’s a lot I didn’t know about my girl.

Don’t spend too much time connecting. Keep focussed on my dissertation.

Blog-leave

I’m taking a couple of weeks of blog-leave due to my writing work load and ill health.

I’ll be back soon.

Patient progress

Concerns: My beloved daughter is burning up with fever. She’s been off school for three days and I haven’t left the house for a walk or a bike ride.

Tedious tasks: I’m still transcribing a few interviews that got corrupted on my dusty computer disks.

Exercise: Hand-washing muddy soccer shorts and socks that never-really-get-clean any more. I wonder how other mothers get things clean.

Distractions: Instead of preparing food I watch Ready Steady Cook on TV with my daughter-patient. My grated apples landed on the sink near the neatly cubed boiled potatoes that didn’t tempt her either.

Progress: I leave her bored and miserable on the couch-bed and transcribe with unrecognisable speed. I’m good at this. My data companion and I make a good team. I have to live with this data in my head for the next 6 months. Transcribe, code, analyse. It's a cycle that never stops.

A thought: My mind prepares to tell the family at dinner tonight what one of the community elders said today. The blurred lines of my various realities shock me back to my senses as I realise it was only the voice in my earplugs who said it 9 years ago in one of my research interviews.

Next: I hope she’s well enough to go back to school tomorrow.

What's data coding?

So what's data coding?
I have to sit and stare at all those 49 interviews that I transcribed into my computer. I then have to find little interesting bits of info. And those little bits are going to form a theory that nobody has come up with yet, at least not in immigration and identity studies. That would then be a good doctoral thesis.

Or maybe those little snippets and titbits of text are just going to build on what somebody else already said, somewhere in that weird and wonderful world of academia. And then I write it all down and explain it in my own words. That would make a good masters dissertation.

49 interviews of an average of about 1,000 numbered lines per transcribed interview equals 49,000 lines to read and code. I'm supposed to go over them several times to get deeper insights. I keep my little labels of interesting insights about what my research participants said in a code book. I divide the interesting things in my code book into a family tree where some labels are parents and some are babies.

I'm supposed to stay alert and keep track of all of this because I have to write it all down and explain it to someone else, namely my supervisor.

I could practice by threading my daughter's beads to make interesting little bracelets and necklaces. At least I could wear them on the outside.

Coding the beads.

Dissertation survival: I’m up to data coding. I have to go through my interview and diary field notes line by line and label chunks. Every time I look at them I get new insights and produce new labels. It’s like my daughter making jewellery. She’s threading beads to make a bracelet out of her many bead trays and the possibilities are endless. She's so creative.

My fear: I’ll never stop coding or labelling. Stoppage is always my biggest challenge in life – when to stop talking, stop writing, stop worrying, stop loving so much. I suppose I’m afraid of moving to the next stage.

My task: Focus on the data. Forget the theory in my Lit Review. Get back to the data. I have to be able to find some new claims and conclusions from the data.

My anchor: Remember that I have to explain all that stuff in my dissertation. Don’t forget there is someone out there called the reader. It’s so easy for a thesis student to fuse with all those words and texts and forget to come up for air.

My promise file: That’s where I put those superbly interesting chunks of data that have no bearing whatsoever on my studies but I can't let them go.

Greatest joy: This is the most creative process I’ve ever gone through. I’m not discovering a story. There is no one-right-path. The Data and I are co-creating the story.

Best advice to myself: Remain a bit skeptical. It’s healthier.