Comps day #2

Question #1 - my advisor's historiographic question - COMPLETE. (Well, I need to finish the last paragraph, but that's it.)

I wrote barely two pages last night and went to bed around 2:30 (though I didn't sleep until after 3). For whatever reason, I woke up at 7:30 and couldn't go back to sleep. I didn't start writing again until after 9, and basically wrote 14 pages throughout the day. Grand total: 45 citations, 15.5 pages, and most all of my energy.

I have been trying to take care of myself physically, so last night I made a really simple meat & potatoes casserole - just garlic mashed potatoes and ground beef, some mozzarella cheese, and some cayenne pepper on top. It was delicious, and so I ate half last night and the rest today for lunch. Tonight I made my mom's green bean casserole - french cut green beans, white corn, water chestnuts, mixed with mushroom soup and sour cream, with a dash of soy sauce and black pepper. It was delicious. I'm really happy that I made just exactly enough of both casseroles (neither of which I had ever made before yesterday) - I ate around half the green bean casserole tonight and will eat the rest tomorrow for lunch. It was delicious.

I also took a quick bike ride this afternoon when I needed to clear my head.... but that didn't turn out so well. I rode only 5.5 miles, but for over half of it the wind and dust was atrocious, and by the time I got home I had drunk my entire 24-oz bottle of water. I felt awful after that, and ended up with a decently bad migraine for about 4 hours. Ugh, so not fun.

I had hoped to be asleep by now, but I'm still trying to finish the conclusion to this essay. I am a little worried I'm not going to sleep well. My migraine meds often make it hard to sleep at night if I had to take them after dinner. I am not sure if I'm going to try to answer my second Spain question in the morning or if I want to switch gears for a day and answer the European women's history & industrialization question I outlined. I guess I'll see in the morning if I'm sick of thinking about Spain or not.

My plan for the rest of comps (migraines willing, that is) looks something like this:
1. One day of planning, to outline as much as possible 3 essays - that was Monday the 16th
2. Three days of writing the essays outlined - today was day (and essay) #1; so Wednesday and Thursday should be writing days
3. One day of planning to outline second set of 3 major field questions - should be Friday, the 20th
4. Three days of writing the final major field questions - Saturday through Monday, the 23rd
5. One day of planning to outline three minor field questions - should be Tuesday, the 24th
6. Three days of writing the minor field questions - Wednesday-Friday, ending the 27th.
7. Final three days to review and ponder, if needed, or to continue any problematic essay - Saturday-Monday the 30th.
8. Submit questions via email and in person as soon as the office opens on Tuesday, March 31st.

D-day

Today is the day. I have my comps questions in an envelope on my end table by the door. They're sealed. I haven't quite gotten the courage up to open them yet.

I slept hard last night - from 10:30 until 7:30. My nerves are through the roof right now.... I have no idea how to start... I think I'm going to get dressed, make some hot tea, and take the plunge by 9. I'm hoping today will be a planning day - a day to outline and try to figure out basically how I should start.

Two weeks. *sigh* I have no idea what I'm doing. God grant me strength...

Sevilla!!!

I made a leap of faith today. After reading dozens of reviews, consulting three good friends whom I trust, and my parents, and praying about it last night and this morning, I made the leap:

Within the last hour, I booked both my flights and a bed at the hostel so I will be in Sevilla from May 18th through June 4th. (I'll actually start the trip on May 17th, but you know - over-night flights and such.) I got to pick my own seats, since the flights are fairly empty right now, so I picked seats near the front of the planes and either on window or aisle seats (depending on whether I want to be able to lean against the wall or stretch into the aisle). For $597, I have a flight cross-country to Atlanta and on to Madrid, and back again in June. When it gets closer, I'll book passage on the AVE high-speed train from Madrid to Sevilla - you can't book more than 60 days ahead of time, which is perfectly understandable. Round trip, the train will cost around $180, which will still make this plan cheaper than flying directly into Sevilla!

So I'll get into Madrid in the morning, in the 9-o'clock hour. Then I'll have to figure out how best to get down to Atocha to get the train. [Just looked at the metro maps - it looks to be a 40-minute, 3-train ride. Not too bad, really. My trips to the AHN were about as long last time I was there.] Hopefully I can find one of the little sandwich shops I used to pass each day down there and grab a little something to eat. Or I think I can eat at the train station, if all else fails.

I'll stay at the hostel from the 18th through June 1st, and then I'll splurge and get a hotel for two nights in Sevilla. I'm considering taking the train back up to Madrid on the 3rd, staying at a hotel near a metro station and taking the metro to the airport the morning of my flight. So three nights in a hotel as reward for working for two weeks and putting up with other people. Not bad, right? And since I don't eat a ton, I figure if I cook/make my evening meals at the hostel (simple things - sandwiches, pasta & veggies, rice & veggies, etc.) I probably could get away with using only half of my grant money on lodgings and travel... which would be awesome!

I'm so excited, I can barely contain myself. I can't believe that, including the travel insurance I got with the plane tickets (for a whopping $32), my grand total for both lodging and transportation for two weeks so far to Spain have come out to all of $990. !!!!!!!!!!!

* * * * *

Now ask me if I'm getting any work done here in my office? Um, yeah. Right. :-p

A tale of comps, migraine, and Spain

So yesterday had the drudgery, the unpleasant, and the giddy.

The drudgery - first, I biked to campus a little before 9 a.m. to try to do some prep work for my meeting with one of my committee members on Monday. I printed out most of my notes for her list, organized them in chronological order within each section, and put them in a notebook so I can just flip through and see my notes on each source if I so choose. I'm trying to do this for each list if I can, just because sometimes I like having things in my hand. A decent number of things on this list were from my seminar with this professor, and I didn't re-read the books, so I had to find my precis for each book and decide which ones I needed to print. I had hoped I'd also do some more work on those lists - finding patterns and such - but since I have no idea what kinds of questions she's going to ask, I didn't even know where to begin.

I then realized I had forgotten to send my rent check, so I had to trek to the post office down the street and send that. I called my landlady to let her know that it was in the mail but probably wouldn't get to her before Monday. She confirmed that she is quite incompetent.

After that, and lunch, I read a book for this prof's list. Now for the unpleasant. Then evil beast migraine returned, and returned insanely fast. K had mentioned that he was staying home, so I called and asked if he could possibly pick me and my bike up so I didn't have to bike home with a migraine for the second time this week. He immediately agreed and came to my rescue. Me, the bike, and 1,000 pounds of books (okay, maybe 5 pounds) got a lift and I got medicine and an ice pack and lay down for an hour.

Now comes the giddy part. I started looking again at flights to Spain for May. I have grant money that I need to use, and I need to go to Sevilla to use it, since that's what they gave it to me for. I have been looking at flights during my last two migraines, and have found some amazing deals to flew to Madrid or Barcelona - we're talking in the $600-$800 range (including taxes). If I flew in to Madrid, I could take a high-speed train and get to Sevilla in 2-3 hours. I kind of like this idea, because I could take the train round-trip for under $200, and I'd get the chance to see the countryside. My hope is that it would be a little less stressful, too...

Then I started looking for places I might be able to stay. Eventually, I found a hostel that, from all the reviews, seems to be quite clean and safe, and has good amenities - breakfast, free wi-fi, 24-hour security and reception, a kitchen, laundry room... but the best part is its location. I saw its basic location on the map and thought it looked somewhat close to the archive I need to work in. So I went to Google maps and put both places in. It couldn't give me the distance in miles because the hostel is located 375 FEET from the archive!!! It's literally around the corner and two buildings down. I about fell off the couch. You're telling me that for around $450 I could stay within a 30-second walk of my archive for 2 weeks?

I emailed them to ask if they allowed smoking (since that would be a deal-breaker), to make sure of the location and proximity to the archive, the proximity of markets/stores, and the noise at night. I'm guessing the guy on the night shift at reception was bored, because he replied within 30 minutes - at 3 a.m. his time! They don't allow smoking in the rooms or anywhere on the premises, they really are that close to the archive, there are 4 supermarkets in walking distance, and they have some rules against noise after a certain time.

It sounds almost too good to be true. I've looked at reviews on probably a dozen sites, and most of them are really good. So now here's my dilemma: do I go ahead and book flights and the room, which assumes that I will pass both my written and oral exams... or do I hold off and wait to see if I can figure something else out after comps?

Busy week and Ridiculous Students

Comps
This week has been insanely productive. Starting from Saturday, I've read the following:

A. Owen Aldridge, The Ibero-American Enlightenment
Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century
Richard Herr, The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918
Lloyd Kramer, "Intellectual History and Philosophy," Modern Intellectual History (2004)
George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology
George Mosse, Nazi Culture
George Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism
Thomas Munck, The Enlightenment: A Comparative Social History, 1721-1794

I also had a good meeting with my advisor talking about the Herr book and the Enlightenment in Spain, and then had a really positive meeting with another committee member yesterday morning about my intellectual history/collective memory list. She doesn't think I'm completely useless, and can tell that I am doing better. She was in a really good mood, too, so I didn't feel half as intimidated as normal.


Teaching
Only 3 of my 40-odd students decided to write this first paper on Rousseau. At least one of them is probably going to get a D, if not lower, since the only citations are from wikipedia (after I expressly told them not to do that, and said the only citations should be from Rousseau, the textbook, and class lectures), the paper is 2 pages too long, and most of it is simply a plot summary (which I also told them not to do). Ugh. Not good.

Today I made my students compete a little and debate whether 1789 brought more change, or if continuity was in fact more prominent. The first two classes did brilliantly. Both sides came up with a ton of examples for their case, and even debated each other sometimes over the grey areas. I was so proud. The third class, though... oy. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I love them, but they're probably going to fail. Three of the 10 did wonderfully, and really put in a ton of work. The others... either just followed along or honestly knew nothing. My Continuity group in that class couldn't figure anything out on their own. They obviously had done no work... I was really disappointed with them.

* * * * *
Oh yeah - one of my students who failed my class last semester has sunk to new lows. From what we can figure out, it is highly likely that the student forged my advisor's signature in order to add our class to his schedule *last Friday*. The story has been complicated more and more, but the story as we know it right now is that he originally was in another freshman-level core class - one not run by our department - but was administratively dropped. (The only reason this would happen would be if he didn't attend the first two weeks' classes.) Then he *claims* that he signed into "Section 16" of our class. But we don't have a section 16. The class with the same number and a section 16 is another course run by our department - but I spoke with some of the grads who teach that class, and they never saw this kid, either. Then the kid *claims* that he signed into section 25 of our course, and that my advisor signed the drop/add sheet last Friday. So the numerous problems with this last statement are:

1) My advisor has made it a policy not to sign in anyone for the course. Since there are 5 graduate TAs and 15 sections, he didn't want to screw with our rosters without our OK. Therefore, he has been sending any and all students who would like to come into the class to us, and gives us full authority to decide whether or not to allow anyone else in to the class. So the claim that my advisor "signed him in" is bogus.

2) My advisor... whom I know very, very well... doesn't come to campus on Fridays. :-)

3) Finally, we asked him, and he denies signing any forms.

So now the department is in the process of trying to get the form from the Registrar's office so my advisor can see for himself what the signature looks like. And then... well, in my mind the Dean of Students and the police should probably be called. But we'll see....

* * * * *

We also had a student come in to the office today looking, generically, for "my ta..." We asked whom she was looking for - she didn't know. She vaguely knew that her class was about Latin American, so I knew which 5 people it could be. But I wasn't in the mood to deal with oblivious and ignorant students, so I just sat there. She finally said it was a guy, and she thought he "might" be Canadian. There's only one guy who fit that, so I asked if it was him - first name, then added his last name after a pause. She asked, "Are those two different guys?" "No," I replied, "that's his name: ___ _____." She just looked dumbly back at me. The the other grad asked what her TA looks like. She hemmed and hawed and finally said that he had darkish hair... and was tall... He also asked if her TA wore glasses, and she said no.

At this point, I just started to laugh. The girl - still completely oblivious and a bit vacuous in her responses - didn't seem to understand. I finally said that we don't have anyone in our department who fits that description - tall, dark, un-bespectacled, and Canadian. The other grad was chuckling, too. I explained that the person whose name I had offered is Canadian, but he is short and wears glasses. He's maybe 5'5", if that. The girl still didn't understand. She continued to say that her TA is quite tall and doesn't wear glasses. She sat down to wait "in case" whomever she was waiting for showed up. I couldn't take it - I finally said that the next time she came it probably would be helpful is she could tell us the name of the person she wanted to meet. Her reply - "I've only been in class for, like, three weeks." [As if that explains it????} I gave up.

When her TA - the one whom I said it was to begin with - came in, she exclaimed that she had never noticed his glasses.... He remarked that she should pay more attention, since he wears them all of the time. From the rest of their conversation, I think she's been missing more than just what her TA looks like....

Gah. Students.

I learned this weekend...

1. That short-term study carrels rock. I practically lived in one this weekend at the library. You get it for 6 hours, and it is a really nice change from my office.

2. That reading three books about Nazism, Nazi ideology, and European racism is enough to depress anyone.

3. That the Enlightenment, if discussed in the right way, can actually be fun to discuss.

4. That Spain DID have an Enlightenment!!!

5. That the banning of a specific kind of hat led to the dissolution of the entire Jesuit order in 1767. Only Spain, baby, only Spain.

6. That I get a little frustrated when professors ignore my email for multiple days...

7. That I have the ability, if I'm not having migraines, to actually get work done. I read 5 books between Saturday and Sunday, and am reading a major work in my field today (and so am going slower because it is the classic work on the 18th century in Spain).

8. That weather shifts of 50 degrees are annoying. It was 80 degrees the middle of last week; they're predicting SNOW, even down here in the metro valley, tonight. Blah. I want my desert heat back.

Tomorrow I have another meeting with my advisor, and I was hoping that on Thursday I could meet with the one committee member whom I know doesn't think I'm doing well for her list. But since she hasn't replied, I'm not sure yet. I'm just trying to work as hard as I can. I have made it two weeks without migraines, and have basically been at work every day for those two weeks. Even on the last two Sundays, I've gone to church and then headed to work after lunch. It kind of stinks, but I don't have a choice if I'm going to pass comps.

One month. *shudders*

I feel a little less stupid

I met with my advisor to talk about Spain, and therefore talk about comps, this afternoon. We haven't done this for a very, very long time. We're talking months. I was petrified. I walked in feeling like I knew nothing about Spain, and he was going to tell me that I have no right being here. Our meeting went very differently.

* He first asked me if I could talk about what I thought were recent trends in the historiography. So I thought for a while, trying to orient myself and put the large amount of crap in my head in chronological order, and finally started talking about questions of identity and complex relations between class, gender, regionalism, and the state.

* He was happy with that as a starting point, and so asked what historical reasons there would be for that trend popping up when it did. I thought, and came up with an answer that seemed utterly too simple. As I thought, I finally said aloud that normally when I think that an answer is too simple and overthink it, David usually tells me that was what he was looking for in the first place. So I gave him my simple answer. And he said, "Absolutely!"

* Then he embarked on what should have been a very simple question, but he wanted to make it obtuse. So, of course, I looked at him like he was insane and had no idea what he was talking about. After about 3 minutes of him continuing to ask the question in different ways, I finally figured out what he was talking about, answered it - again, the really basic answer - and we went on.

* After that stop-start-stop-start beginning, we proceeded to talk for 2 good hours about the historiography. I found that I could legitimately talk about the holes in the field, why I thought some of the holes were there, where the major trends seemed to be, when the major trends seemed to pop up, perhaps why they seemed to pop up, etc.

* He also explained his thoughts on potential exam questions. Right now there are five potentials for writtens and orals:

--Historiography question - asking some broad question about historiographic trends, akin to what we did today, or perhaps focusing in on a more specific topic, not sure yet

--Teaching question - asking how to teach Spain in the context of either an Atlantic World or a World history course - so I would have to have a plan for how to design and teach an entire course, complete with readings and strategies in mind

--Eighteenth century - question on the Spanish Enlightenment and how it connects or compares to the Enlightenment in the rest of Europe

--Nineteenth century - perhaps a broader question on the Spanish 19th century; we talked about maybe giving me a broader question here to let me play with it a bit more

--Twentieth century - a question on the impact of the end of the Franco regime and the transition era - though he told me that he's not leaning toward this question. For which I would be glad. Though I did have to ask for more books if he has any hope of making me discuss the Spanish Enlightenment, because he neglected to give me any readings that so much as discuss it even a little. So, ack, I had to add more books today. On the bright side, he said that means I can cut out three books in exchange. Yay!

When I finally got out of the meeting, I actually felt *not* stupid about my specialization. Woo-hoo!!

So, maybe I do know something about Spain... Now I just have to get the other 4 committee members to feel this good about me (and vice versa).