annoying

i find it annoying to have all those people asking me "so do you know what you're going to do your research on?" because the answer is no, i don't know, i am freaking out. not completely yet, but starting to get there, really.

i wish i could do this thing really quickly, write and defend my proposal this fall semester already... but if i don't know what my research will be about, i doubt this will happen. CRAP, i said i was going to revise my TESOL Quarterly article this summer... haven't done anything. they thought it might be an interesting topic, this nonnative stuff, with the time component, which no one has done before, and george thought so too, but he's very encouraging, i don't know how much of that is really interesting for the field. plus i am thinking that it's not because something has not been done yet that someone has to do it. yes, having "original" ideas is nice, but the original idea can be crap, so that's not helpful...

administration, i love administration... i loved the human resource class... very interesting stuff. how could i combine that with ESL? how could i work in switzerland? what's with their new language legislations and regulation stuff? ok, cat = not going anywhere... put the cat at my parents' house while i'm doing research in switzerland? hehe... poor cat!

i don't like my academic writing style... anais said it sucked but i knew that already, i hate to write and i write super long sentences that make no sense and that are totally boring and dumb and bad. and i'm an english teacher, yeah! i mean, i couldn't write in french either, it'd be even worse. what can i do to improve my writing style? write more? haven't i written a LOT already? how many papers have i written in my life??? don't i read a lot? isn't it a fact that the more you read the better you write? that's what i tell my students... seems to be a lie.

i read parts of a dissertation by fox about ITAs... scary how much it ressembles my MA thesis! same kind of stuff, same lit review, same analysis of the results, same questions... i guess it's because i used her questionnaire as the basis of my research... i changed many of the questions but you can still see that my questionnaires come from hers. and i didn't even cite her, i think, i mean i cited a paper that cited her, but i've lost that paper and never have been able to find it again, plus it wasn't a published paper, it was something that george had found and had sent me. i should really try to find this thing again...

i'm reading prodigal summer by barbara kingsolver. hard to read. weird style. so far so good.