dissertation digest #4

857.

okay, first of all, i have no idea what's wrong with me.  physically, i feel absolutely wretched. this is sort of how i feel when i'm about to have an anxiety attack, but i'm not 100% sure that that's what this is.  i was sitting in my office, and at about 9.30 i started feeling kind of nauseous and my head started to kind of hurt.  it might be because my blood sugar is falling too low, but honestly, eating something, anything, right now does not sound very appealing at all.  and my head is getting that heavy, kind of groggy feeling again, which seems to have started happening early this week.  it's not lack of sleep.  for someone who's writing a dissertation i get plenty of sleep.  and funny that all day today, while i wasn't trying to work on my dissertation, i felt fine.  so i feel like this feeling is somehow connected to trying to work on my dissertation this evening.  i ended up writing 857 words.  i had hoped for 1000 words tonight, but i'll take what i can get right now and i also have an idea of what needs to come next.  while i was working in the office i was adding things to my to-do list. it now has 16 items on it, where it read 8 when i started working at 6.00 this evening.  ugh. even now i still have that nauseous, queasy feeling.  the only thing that seems to be missing that is typical of one of my anxiety attacks is the trembling.  i can usually feel myself trembling a lot (more than the usual caffeine-induced trembling i'm used to) as well as the sense of being really hot.  honestly, i have to find a way to make these feelings stop.

well, in other news, i'm still working on drafting chapter 3 of the dissertation.  i am going to have to really work everyday, diligently, for the rest of the month (save the four days when i am on vacation in mid-september) to get to where i want to be on september 30th--a draft of chapter 3 and a draft of chapter 5.  these people who say they wrote their dissertation in 3 weeks or 8 weeks, i really can't imagine how they did that.  tonight was a so-so writing session.  i had a lot of trouble focusing on what i was trying to write.  i'm teaching online this semester, and my students have been blogging and submitting response papers since thursday.  i was lax about reading posts on friday when i should have been reading and responding.  i got a lot of reading of posts done today at home before going to the office to work on my own work, but when i got to the office i spent an hour (and really, i do not know how i spent an hour on these tasks) doing additional work for my class, and every time my freedom session expired i found myself going back to the course space.  just going there--not doing any real work.  so, it was really hard to focus on my writing tonight.  i'm grateful for the 857 words and will hope for and try to write 1000 words tomorrow.