Full Disclosure

I should be going to bed right now. My right eye is twitching from the copious amount of reading I've done in the last two weeks. It's actually sort of impressive, so allow me to toot my own horn:

1. Jennifer Barker's The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience
2. Vivian Sobchack's Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture
3. Lisa Gitelman's Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture
4. Thomas Augst's A Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America
5. Mary Ann Doane's "The Voice in Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space"
6. Kaja Silverman's "Body Talk"
7. Teresa de Lauretis' "Oedipus Interruptus", "Desire in Narrative", and "Strategies of Coherence"

All told, that's around 950 pages of history and philosophy spread across 5 full days and 4 half days (full days are days when I don't have class or other engagements and half days are when I devote at least 6 hours). When I say "full days," I do not mean that I wake up and am reading within fifteen minutes, that I only lay the book down to sprint to the bathroom, wolf down some cold pizza, and speed-shower. I mean that I read until I hit a saturation point, then I watch an episode of 30Rock or check Facebook and Gmail while I cook myself some food. Then I start reading again, then I take a break to go to the gym or work out at home. I read like a normal human being would read: while she's also living a life and finding time to enjoy what's going on around her. I also took the entire Friday after Thanksgiving off to give thanks to myself (ergo, my laundry didn't get done this week. We all make sacrifices, Lemon).

If you're another PhD student, or if you've already been through this always already new and fresh hell called graduate school, then you know that it is totally not okay for me to be spilling this kind of intimately personal information about the number of pages I read a day and my penchant for 20-minute sitcom study breaks. If you're not one of "us," then the unspoken rule to keep these kinds of details silent might feel as stupid and nonsensical to you as it does to me, and I apparently belong here. So I'll continue as though you're not one of "us" (hey, me neither!).

In a typical week this semester, I set aside all day Sat-Mon to reading and I tend to get 150-200 pages a day during those days. I'm a pretty slow reader; I read aloud a lot, and when I'm reading silently, I "read aloud" to myself in my head, so it's at the same speed either way (though, if you know me, you know how fast I can talk, so...). I've tried to improve my speed, but I have no retention unless I take it slowly, and even then, I find myself rereading quite a bit, stopping for long periods to take notes or explore an idea that the reading has triggered, etc. I average about 20 pages an hour of theory/philosophy, though the speed tends to increase as I move through the book because those first chapters, I'm still trying to figure out how the writer is saying what she's saying. It's only after I get into the writer's grove (if she has one, some don't) that I'm able to pick up the pace. Reading history goes a little faster, more like 25-30 pages/hour; these history books I'm reading blend close reading, philosophy, and history (of the book), so they're strange. One minute, I'm speed reading, and the next, I've had to slow way down to catch the flow of a particularly quirky close reading, especially if it's of a text I've not read before (or watched, as is often the case when I'm reading film theory).

On Wednesdays, I wake up at 9 (because, as you can see from the time stamp on this entry, I go to sleep in the wee hours of the mornings after an intense Tuesday out and about in the world). I hit the gym for some awesome step aerobics, come home and shower and feed myself, go to TA group, and I don't get back to my tiny apartment, fed, and settled in to read until mid-afternoon, and because I've been out and about, the unwind time is unpredictable and has sometimes lasted late into the evening Wednesdays, then, are sometimes a bust, but I can usually squeeze in around 100 pages on those days if I'm focused, which, you know, who knows? Tuesdays and Thursdays this semester were insanity. Starting at around week 10, I've been getting up at 7 on those mornings and getting to Starbucks by around 8 so that I can read for 4 hours before class, office hours, and another class, which lasts from 12:30-10pm. I get home around 10:30, which means I've been up and going at 100-mph for 15.5 hours, likely on as few as 3 hours of sleep (and, sadly, because of the crazy stomach/body issues I've had lately, on as few as 800 calories a day, and most of those have been lattes).

The above account doesn't consider the films I viewed for class or for writing a paper (around 8 hours over the course of two weeks), or the paper I wrote (5p, which I ended up spending around 10 hours on, scattered throughout the last week). Or the 8 gym visits (1.5 hours each), 7 decent night's sleep (6+ hours), 7 shitty night's sleep (3-5 hours), office hours (6 total) and TA groups (7.5 hours)... the list goes on and on. I justify my time to both of us. Yet with all this, I still feel like I'm just not giving it enough. Like I'm just not going to pull this off. Yet it's all I do, 6 days a week. On the 7th day, I'd love to say that the goddess rests, but instead, she launders her clothing, cleans her apartment, goes to the gym, and catches up on watching TV for the week (House, Lie to Me).

Truth is, I feel, for the first time since I've been here, that I've really started to figure out this lifestyle: I now know how to do a PhD program, and maybe not get straight A's, but to do the work the best I can and try to save my sanity in the process. I mean, my life is not exactly what I'd call regimented except the schedule the university would have me keep, such as to be at one class at xxx, to have x office hours per week, to attend TA groups. Those things, I show up to at a certain time, but when I'm not doing that, I'm reading, sleeping, exercising, laundering, grocering, showering, typing, or traveling between the places where I do such things: my tiny apartment, Starbucks, the laundromat, the gym, Meijer, and the bus. I sleep at strange hours, go to Starbucks at odd times and for long stretches (6 hours one day last week; got a lot read). I put my earbuds in and listen to this amazing audio track from the CD called Focus on ADHD: Attention and Concentration for Study (which, in case I didn't say so, is amazing); it's an hour long, so I read until the track is finished, then I get up, go to the bathroom, get another latte or americano, and hit play again. It relieves my mind from worrying about when I need to leave to get to class on time, but it also assures me that I'm reading a lot in one sitting, instead of getting up and down every 15 minutes, which is what I'm tempted to do if I'm at home. Enough propaganda; buy the track and see for yourself if you're not more productive when you listen to it. Works with your brain waves, man.