Dissertations

We all (well, the archaeology department's MA students, anyway) have to do a mini-dissertation this semester, apparently to prove that we do indeed have research skills (a good idea in my case, as everyone else has written a dissertation before, and I've only had The Shitty Senior Thesis Show of Infamy) and so we can maybe use this as a stepping stone to the actual dissertation, which we do this summer. And basically, we can do whatever we want, as long as we can somehow vaguely relate it to archaeology. So I picked a topic in paleopathology. And now I am learning the pitfalls of getting to do extensive research in your favorite subject. The books you need are always shelved with other books you do not need, but which appear irresistibly fascinating. So, every time I go to the library, I come back with one or two books that I will actually use for the mini-dissertation, and five or six that have nothing to do with my subject but which I absolutely need to read immediately. I did not have this problem when I had to do art theory research, because reading more that I needed to would have caused my brain to break down. But now? I spend more time reading books I picked up on a whim than I do reading books that I'm actually going to use. It's very bad.

I actually asked my mother if she could maybe send me some journal articles, because I am even worse when it comes to databases. "Ooo, this article doesn't really have anything to do with my subject, but it looks so interesting. I'll just take a few minutes to read it, and then I'll get back to what I'm supposed to be doing." And then five hours later I finally tear myself away from the database because I'm starving, but have accomplished nothing except to become very well-informed about a subject that is tangentially related to what I'm supposed to be researching.

It's going to be a very long summer, isn't it?