Good tidings we bring

Well, now that NaNoWriMo is over, I actually have time to blog. I just finished a draft of a 50,000 word novel. I am pretty proud of some of it and the rest of it is humiliating. But that's what editing is for.

Philip: "It had better not be about an angsty girl trying to get through life...it is, isn't it?"
Me: "...Two?"

Ever since I've started writing this book I have been much happier. Obviously some of this is circumstantial or due to other obvious factors, but the fact that I was able to consistently write 2,000 words a day in the middle of the school year proved several things to me. One, it proved that I can do something if I love it. I have not, as I had feared, lost my work ethic. Two, it showed me that I am capable of carrying out fiction projects while in the midst of a scholarly career, contrary to everything I had believed up until that point. At first I thought that my dedication to NaNo was proof that I was in the wrong career, that I was meant to be a writer and not an archaeologist. Now, however, I feel that is not necessarily true. I think my success with NaNo is a testament to how powerful I can be when I care. And the truth is, an academic career is one of the few kinds where you have significant control over your research topics. You get to study what you care about. When I get my own research, as long as I can be assertive enough to ensure it's something I really want to do, maybe I'll be able to just get it done.

I realized this when Noreen proposed that I start a bone analysis project this semester, before our museum is deprived of our Native American collections this spring. From the little information I have, it sounds very exciting, mostly because it is starting now and I am learning to do something that Noreen and everyone in the lab are very good at, and will thus get plenty of help. Noreen is also teaching her Soil Analysis course in the Harvard Forest in the spring, which I want to take.

I spent most of Thanksgiving coughing and talking like the smoker lady with the hole in her throat from that '90s TV spot that traumatized my entire generation. (At night, my eyes got confused and thought they were my nose, which meant that for the last few days I have not bothered to wear eyeliner. This has produced a number of reactions amongst the surrounding members of my species. Apparently without my makeup I am something between "lovely" and "unrecognizable.")

But the point is, when I came back to Harvard, I felt so welcomed and remembered how much I enjoyed these people. I'm starting to think I don't even want to take time off next year, that it would make more sense to finish out the round of classes and generals with my cohort and then perhaps allow a term off for self reflection. Maybe I'm just insane, but I think I can pick out the point where the magic kicked in. I can really honestly feel a difference, a physical difference. I feel like I've never felt in years. I feel young again. I feel like I am enjoying life so much more fully now, despite the fact that I've started to do work again. I've been actually doing it, and actually not minding! I had not realized how bad things had gotten because I had been so accustomed to feeling bad, but now...it's like a different world.

Kate came to visit, and seeing her was really inspiring. It was also great to see Jenny again. I feel like the tide has turned. There will obviously be hard times, but I feel like the wind has changed. I really was thinking today about how hard it would be to give up these people but also this language that I've learned to speak, this culture I've been steeped in without even noticing that normal people didn't talk about iconography or spindle whorls or the Old and New Worlds.

There's a lot more I could say, but I don't think I need to.