In return for registering as full-time students (as required), we are entitled to participate in six tutorials, and to write six exams.  And, we're required to prepare an answer to one question from one of last year's exams, for one of the tutorials.  Like we have time in June, I thought -- but not all students are trying to take a seven-week hiatus from a crazy workload to prepare.  In fact, the other three students writing comps this summer are full-time students in the real sense of that word.  I bet they've even read everything they were supposed to!

Anyway, I committed myself to preparing my answer for the last possible tutorial.  Now it's two days away, and I didn't realize until this afternoon that I'd lent my books to a fellow student and had never got them back.   So now I had to admit to one colleague at least that I'd not started until today.  How to make friends and influence colleagues! Sheesh!

I did look through the 5,000 or so pages of articles we were expected to read, along with two texts, and realized that I recognized not one of them.   I took this course in the fall of 1997.  My complete lack of memory of this material may be the result of my rapidly advancing age (trust me -- it's increasing by more than one day at a time this summer!), or just that I've used the hard-drive for more interesting and lucrative things in the interim.  Too bad we can't back up our brains onto zip drives.  If my engineering life-partner really loved me, he'd have figured that out for me by now, don't you think?

In any case, I did manage to read one chapter of Karl Polanyi.   The content was okay -- how land and labour became fictitious commodities to accommodate commercialism and a market economy -- but the style! Oh my!  Then I realized that almost all the most substantive texts were translations from other languages -- Schumpeter, Weber, Marx (and direct translations from German are the most painful!), Foucault, Habermas  -- not an English-speaker among them.  Perhaps that explains my overwhelming propensity to fall asleep every time I try to read one of these guys. (And they all are guys, as were the professors teaching them.  Coincidence, you say?   Ha.)  It's not the content that is the problem; it's the dry translation into an unwilling and unaccommodating academic English.

I'm not sure, though, that this insight is enough to create the attitude adjustment I'm feeling I need and soon.  I am too old to want to wish away a summer, to want the comps to be over, to suffer through everything until then, even if it is only seven weeks.  I refuse to wish my life away, for anything or anyone.   So, I have to find a way to like what I'm doing.  And to do it responsibly.  And incrementally.  And not in the final weeks, and then have to count on deities I don't believe in to spare me the embarassment of failing at this point.

It's true that I'm often unsure of why I am going through this.   After all, I can make a living in my field.  And heaven knows, I have no desire to earn a living in the stultifying dreary internal politics of the academy in the form of a university.  I remind myself that I wanted to be able to spend short periods of time -- a year, maybe two -- in various far-off locations, and that I believed that having a doctorate would make short-term research or teaching jobs easier to come by.   That desire is still there, and I still believe that it's a wise course to help achieve that goal.  However, I often wonder if I'd have undertaken it, if I'd had any idea how tiring it all is, and how readily I slumber when I'm meaning to be learning.

Well, I've completed six courses.  After completing four the first year, I told myself that I'd come so far, I really oughtn't to stop now.  Then I did one more year and two more courses.  And now I really oughtn't to stop when I'm qualified to do these exams.  And all indicators are that what remains cannot be as deadening as that which approaches this summer.  So... perhaps this is the beginning of the end -- of deadening, dreary, sleep-inducing absorption of dead writers whose first language isn't English.  I can do this.  Right?

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