School's out forever (and I'm never gonna let it go)

Last week, I took my final oral exams. It was intense. I didn't know whether one is supposed to dress up for these things, so I went business casual--jacket and nice shirt but no tie. I moved away from Walla Walla in December, so I had to drive back for the exam. I borrowed my parents' car because it had a cassette player so I could listen to my new Dolly Parton audiobook on the way. I am sure I will write more about this, but Dolly Parton's autobiography My Life...and Other Unfinished Business is absolutely incredible. I laughed! I cried!

I arrived about 2 hours early, giving me enough time to buy a soy latte, print off a copy of the thesis, wrestle with the industrial strength electric stapler in the library, conclude that the stapler is very much broken, get the librarian to try to fix it, wrestle with it some more, nearly impaling myself with giant staples--at this point I was imagining myself being rushed to Walla Walla General Hospital and having to call my thesis committee to come gather around my hospital bed to facilitate my oral exams while a team of surgeons yanked stray staples out of my internal organs...happily, though, I was able to get the damn thing to sort of stay together in one slightly mangled document. 100 pages, 28,000 words, including notes.

Then I remembered that the committee would probably ask me about my methodology. The weird thing about studying religion is that it's a field of study, not a discipline. You can apply tons of different methologies to the field; sociology, political science, historiography, biography, anthropology, psychology, etc. I tend to favor a polymethodological approach, which allows me to bring together elements of everything. But the thing about polymethodological study is that you sort of have to have one methodology dominate, otherwise you can just ramble on a long time and not really make any arguments. Wendy Doniger calls this "polymethodoodling all the day", which is among my favorite stupid academic-study-of-religion jokes. Anyway, I had sort of opted to make "cultural studies/cultural criticism" my dominant methodology. But I realized that I didn't really know how to define cultural studies, so i quickly reviewed it---thanks, Wikipedia!

We met in Melissa's office. Melissa is my thesis advisor. Such a rad lady. Unfortunately she gets her furniture from thrift stores, and i ended up in an old easy chair with worn out springs. I sank really deep into it, low to the ground, which made the process kind of intimidating because it made it seem like all three members of the thesis committee were a foot taller than me.

But it turned out to be a really mellow experience. 45 minutes of Q&A went super fast. I was expecting to get grilled and to have to aggressively defend myself, but they mostly wanted to talk about their favorite parts of the thesis and have me elaborate on them a little. I fumbled my way through methodology questions and I even got to use that Hannah Arendt quote about storytelling my nice ex-boyfriend told me about. I passed "with distinction". I'm not sure what that means, exactly, Maybe it's just like the little gold star that Ms. Reisinger used to put on my multiplication tables back in third grade when I got a perfect score. Anyway, this means college is 100% done. Kind of a big deal, I guess.

Anyway, I want to publicly thank everyone who's helped me with this thesis. Everyone who let me bounce ideas off them and shared suggestions and insights, everyone who encouraged me and remained patient with me as this weird project became the center of my life and I became incapable of having a conversation about anything else. You know who you are. I love all y'all.

I am pleased that I will now have more time to regularly update this blog. I am also pleased that I will be moving to Anacortes at the beginning of March. 2006 = Major Life Changes!