((Laboring))

I started the day with a nice rejection from PANK--oh well! This Labor Day weekend has been tough. I have moved between intense anger, listlessness, sense of failure, depression and missing someone I really really love. And if I have to be perfectly honest, it's the last thing that has been causing a lot of the other things I listed above. There are other things, too. For example, the anxiety over my dissertation. But nothing fucks me up as a conflict with a childhood friend, someone who should have understood me better than anyone else! But this is also something I have come to realize in the last few days--I am an intensely ideological person. For me, the "personal" is really really "political" and vice versa. I tend to de-code the smallest moments in my life, our lives, and this often creates emotional problems and distances with people I otherwise love and cherish. I know a lot of the things I am extremely critical of wouldn't necessarily bother most others. But this is me, and I also recognize, this propensity of mine has also given me an unique voice, I don't really intend to change myself. I am all willing to try hard to be a better person. I am all willing to modify my rhetoric depending upon the context. But what I am not willing to do is, to enter into too many "compromises."

In other news, I am still working on the fourth chapter of my dissertation. I get very easily tired these days. I cannot write more than a page or a page-and-half. But I do work on it every day. So, I am making progress. Although I am far from being done, it does help me to see that I am adding on to the chapter, I am paving my way towards completion.

In the creative writing front, I have been revising a story I wrote a while back. I got some feedback on it from my workshop, so I am trying to do some revisions. Let's see how it goes!