Taking One for the Team

I got an email from my thesis advisor yesterday, encouraging me to present at the Graduate Research Conference. This was about the third email I've gotten "encouraging me" to present. I've ignored them, because it's not something I really want to do. It may be funny to have phrases like "stop, my butt hurts" (one of the meanings of the word Yaoi) in my thesis. Less funny to have to say them out loud to strangers while doing a power point. However, I read the various responses contained in the email that had been forwarded along, and it all originated from the Dean of Graduate Studies who was extending the deadline for submitting abstracts and personally requesting that someone from Women's Studies presents.

*sigh*

You don't say no to the Dean of your college. Knowing my other classmates, I had a sneaking suspicion none of them planned on presenting, so despite my deep desire not to present, I've decided to "take one for the team" and do it. I will be presenting information from my thesis "Queering the Lines: Women Writing Same-sex Male Couples in Fiction" (at least I think that's my title). The conference is April 7th, I don't have a time for when I will be presenting yet. So if anyone wants to watch me stand up in front of a bunch of academics and talk about masturbation and anal sex... please feel free to show up. Maybe that way I won't notice the dean of my college in the audience.

And the Procrastination Continues

I haven't posted for a few days; I've been very busy. Of course very little of what I've been busy with is thesis related. If it was, I wouldn't be able to claim the title of reigning queen of procrastination. Here is a list of what I've been doing... instead of my thesis:

1.) Watching the History Channel
2.) Making egg salad
3.) Driving to and from the Cities
4.) Going to dinner and a show
5.) Playing D&D
6.) Playing the Sims
7.) Cleaning my apartment
8.) Sitting around thinking about how I need to start my thesis
9.) Throwing a temper tantrum because I got two rejections out of fifteen
10.) Surfing the facepages
11.) trying to contact that guy whose auto part is sitting in my living room.
12.) Writing this post

So as you can see it's been a busy few days. Future procrastination attempts are likely to involve more History channel, grocery shopping, and possibly neopets. I'm continuing to work on my data analysis as well, which has to be done, but is also a bit of a procrastination for actually writing the damned thesis. As an aside post-it notes are actually helpful data analysis tools.

And Jacob Begat Data Analysis

Reading survey responses is fun. What's not fun is making charts about them, or writing those charts out in words. It's like the book of the bible that's nothing but "begat-ing". It's all like "And five people said this, and eight people said this, and another five people said this." It puts me to sleep writing it, who the hell wants to read that? I guess that's why academic=boring.

Irish vs. Thesis

So, I'm writing a masters thesis for my Masters of Science in Women's Studies. I'm the kind of girl who puts everything off until the last possible minute, needing a looming deadline to get anything done. The problem is, you can't really write a thesis that way. With two weeks before I have to have a complete first draft, and only having about 20 pages or so actually written, and needing to have at least another fifty... what do I do about it? Start a blog obviously.

I thought I'd keep a little blog about my trials and tribulations over writing my thesis, especially since I conducted a survey on the internet, I thought those who were surveyed might want to know how things were going. Also, as a writer of both original and fanfiction of male same-sex couples, I frequently mention "my thesis," and I thought some folks might want to know what that shit was all about.

My thesis, for those of you who may not know, is on women who write male same-sex couples in fiction. In layman's terms: chicks who write slash/yaoi. I've had some people suggest that this is a very narrow area to research, after all, how many women can there be who write gay men?

The answer: A TON!
I did a very brief count to get a general number for my thesis. I looked at just at Harry Potter fanfiction on fanfiction.net, and only counted the number of stories that cited the most common couples (Remus/Sirius, Harry/Ron, Harry/Draco etc.)I came up with 35,000 stories! As those of us in the community know, the majority of slash is written by women. Anyway, I assume you get the picture. Tons of women all over the world are writing slash, and I believe it is my sacred duty to bring the study of that into academia, and thus begins: Irish vs. Thesis.