the dissertation (specifically, the comments made by a committee member on a draft of the intro/lit review) is making me feel:

• vulnerable
• inferior
• lethargic
• defeated
• isolated
• hopeless

she's a smart lady, and i practically idolize her,* and all of her comments are good, and point out deficiencies in my research/knowledge of the literature. but no one seems to understand how much i Just Don't Care about the dissertation, my research, and academia in general right now, and how i had been hoping fingers crossed pretty please with a cherry on top to slide by with my 3/4-assed dissertation, and how every damn day i think about whether i'll regret it later if i just give up now and drop out.

*she really is an awesome woman. married her first husband the weekend after meeting him, then divorced him several months later. she got her ph.d. in linguistics in the '60s after she married her current husband, one of the great minds of experimental design (and also a jewish escapee from 1930s germany, and a theatre director). she pretty much invented the field of psycholinguistics one day when she and a friend were sitting around her house marveling at the funny things their small children were saying. she used to ride a motorcycle into work. even emeritus, she is one of the premier researchers in her field, with too-many-too-count awards, citations, invitations to talk, articles published, theories invented/proven/disproven, and successful former students. and through all that, she is perhaps the most gracious person i have ever met, knowing just the right thing to say to anyone in any situation, with a particular skill for injecting just the right amount of humor.