What's more frightening than a mirror?

I'm always haunted by some guy, as my Readers will know. This week, that Guy is myself. Is there anything more frightening? 

As a responsible woman who has read her Freud, I recognize this as a textbook unheimlich situation. An uncanny double. The unheimlich, or literally, the un-homely. That which is supposed to remain hidden, but has been forcibly revealed. To get even more Freudian with it, the return of the repressed.

Reader, my three QE essays have coalesced into a Doppelgänger of emilyjones, and I fear her. A version of myself who simultaneously is and is not me. For three hours on Tuesday, I will be engaged in hand-to-hand combat with my own distorted reflection as some of the most respected members of my career field watch and judge.

Or maybe the Doppelgänger is the wrong uncanny double to use in this metaphor. Maybe I'm more like Victor Frankenstein. In my hubris, I've created a monster, perhaps inadvertently in my own image. When I submitted the essays to be read, she escaped. But now she's coming back. And she demands that I make another creature (a dissertation prospectus).

I'm terrified to look upon my own creation because it necessarily requires looking at myself. What do I create, using MY sources, that I chose, as the culmination of MY year of preparation? What does emilyjones do when left to her own devices? 

 I'm afraid I will open the essays that I was so proud of a couple weeks ago, and they will have turned back into a proverbial pumpkin. The haze I was in while I wrote will have dissipated and I'll see the disgusting truth. It's like when a new mother is so under the influence of pain meds and hormones that she is blind to the fact that her baby looks like a raw chicken.

As long as I continue not reading the essays, they will continue to be good.

Of course, reading the essays is both the cause and the solution to my problems. In theory, I could find out once and for all if my essays were competently written. However, I know that I cannot be an impartial judge of that. I can speculate about what the faculty will say about them, but there's no way to know. 

I brought this up to Allison.

"Well, you probably got a text or something afterward saying that the essays were good and that the oral exam is a-go?" No I did not.

"I mean, the next day I saw Nick and he said that he'd scrolled through them, and that they 'looked like QE essays.'"

"Oh, they always say that. They passed the sniff test, like James says."

I spend 36 hours writing, and all I know is that Nick has scrolled through them and believes they are of appropriate length and contain a reasonable amount of sources. To say nothing of Shannon, James, or Mary Ann.

This is the problem with the faculty. Sometimes no news is good news, yes. But plenty of other times good news is good news. I remember Flannery showing us her text from Nick saying that her essays were "Extremely bar clearing" or some such quirky Nick-ism.

It is slightly embarrassing and extremely undignified to put into writing how badly I need to be told that I am doing a good job. However, I choose to blame the department rather than myself, because there is no standardized type or amount of feedback, or a timeline for when you can expect it. A text from Nick would go a long way in easing my mind about these things.

I did get a text from him today, that had nothing to do with the QE or anything. He texted me during the Works In Progress session we were both at, to point out a missed opportunity for a "but this is ridiculous!" joke. Two texts:

    "You missed your bad joke opportunity"

    "'I've heard about *archive fever* but ...'"

This was about Lester's piece, which I did not read, so I was sort of zoning out, so I have no idea what the setup to this joke was. I'm glad he's joining the eternal search for "but this is ridiculous" jokes. I explained to him in our last meeting that you have to keep doing them as etudes. Like Monet, painting the Rouen cathedral over and over in different lighting conditions.

But I digress. One day I'll read my essays, Reader. And also one day whoever is in charge here at Oneword will standardize what bits of dialogue are italicized and which aren't.

Maybe I'll write another post later, about what actually happened during the day, rather than just my spiraling thoughts about what will happen next week.

But until then, this has been,

Emilyjones 

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