The Most Exciting Boring Story Ever Told, PhD

Well! It finally has come true, my dream that was born roughly in 1998.

It all started when

just kidding.

The Most Exciting Boring Story Ever Told

If you don’t like boring stories, then don’t read this!!!! This is the story of how I finally got my PhD, and it is a thrilling adventure tale involving much sprinting and sweating and desperate praying to a nonexistent god. It also primarily involves getting different pieces of paper stamped, thus falls under the rubric of “Kafkaesque Nightmare” thus also “not that great of a personal anecdote, actually.” Which of these features of the tale will most strike you? Only the brave may know for sure, by continuing to read. At your peril.

Yes, so! I defended yesterday, and it was very nice. You’re always afraid that even though everyone on your committee seems to genuinely like you as a person, and even like your project, you’ll still sit down at the defense and suddenly they’ll be like “THIS IS BULLSHIT, FUCK YOU.” Because, it could happen! It physically COULD happen. Plus you’ve heard stories. Horrible, horrible stories. Not about your own department, but still. And anything that could happen HAS happened in an infinite universe, so that means somewhere in this crazy cosmos my adviser just made me cry. Awful! So glad I live in this cosmos and not that one! Wait, is that how you use ‘cosmos?’ Don’t ask me, I’m just a DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY.

Other Things Not To Ask Me Even Though I Am A Doctor Of Philosophy:
– “what’s the deal with Hegel?”
– “math question” (exception: “why is math so dumb and awful”)
– “something about music from a period or country you have not studied”
– “what do all these words mean”

Anyway, so, continuing with the most exciting boring story ever told: So I’ve told you about the 37 page pdf that tells you how to format and file your dissertation once you’ve actually written it and made sure your footnotes are only marginally incorrect and totally unhelpful. This 37 page pdf is a legend and a bane in the department, with the students who are still in coursework staring wide-eyed as you try to even describe the barest minimum of what occurs inside this pdf, and they get more and more terrified, and you’re piling up stacks of different combinations of title page/signature page/abstract/weird forms/different forms/etc. And you’re like “DON’T SPEAK TO ME” because you’ve decided you “have” to file by today, and you only have 25 minutes and you just realized something horrible that you did wrong.

But I get ahead of myself. So you toddle off to Office Depot or whatever and buy your fancy 20 pound 25% cotton bond paper which costs only $20 for 500 sheets because Pete is a genius who knows to go to Office Depot or whatever instead of the campus bookstore. But still! So you have 500 sheets of the fancy paper (“dissertation MUST be printed on 20 pound 25% cotton bond paper. Dissertation WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED on ANY OTHER KIND OF PAPER”) and you’re thinking, “oh, this will be enough, because I only need two copies of my dissertation, and that’s only 406 pages, great,” but you soon realize you’ve forgotten not only the ten “preliminary pages” (“must be spaced and organized EXACTLY as delineated in the ‘sample dissertation preliminary pages’ starting on page 30”) that you must have more like FOUR copies of, because of all the different manila envelopes various combinations of them have to go inside of for different campus offices, BUT ALSO you’ve forgotten that YOU ARE BAD AT THIS SORT OF THING and that there are bound to be fuck-ups. But again I get ahead of myself and this entrancing tale.

So the first thing that happened was I took a sample to the filing lady. The filing lady is also legend in our department. She has supposedly made tons of people actually cry. So I went in armed with my most disarming smile/behavior/comportment, expecting to be ripped to shreds. But she was very nice! But, she told me I had to go back and put my bibliography on my table of contents, along with a listing of musical figures (too boring to explain even in this already amazingly boring tale). She also pointed out THAT MY NAME IS WRONG.

As a student, you are registered with your full name. First, Middle, Last. Yours Truly does not generally use the middle name, and has published and taught and everything else as just First, Last. So it is just First, Last that are on ALL MY DISSERTATION PAGES. And of course your name has to be exactly the same on these pages as it is in the system or zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz I just fell asleep

The point then is that I couldn’t just go print it out and bring it back, because now there are changes to be made, thus subtracting precious seconds to the ticking clock. But the other point is that my signature page–with all the signatures of my committee members on it–has this wrong form of my name on it, now. And it is famously impossible to get all the members of your committee together in the same place, or even to successfully find and speak to all of them on a given day, as they are far-flung busy people, and one of them you know for a fact just took the bus home, and another one of them you know for a fact is at this moment on a plane high above the ground, flying to Harvard. Who knows where the other two are. I thought “shit.” Then I thought “variety of swears.” Then I realized you don’t have to give anyone the ORIGINAL of this page, for some reason, so I just printed out a piece of paper with the corrected sentence on it, cut it out with scissors, taped it to the page, and copied THAT onto the fancy paper.

(are you yet amazed by how boring this exciting story is??? It gets more boring!)

SO THEN, the next thing I did was go out to a long leisurely lunch with my adviser. We got mojitos and talked about cooking and feminism and Jane Eyre and the iPad. She told me about the first time she ever heard reggae. We got sweet potato fries.

Saying goodbye to her, I then RAN all the way up Hilgard, back to the department. I now had 1.5 hours to get this filed before all the offices closed. I raced into the TA office and found somebody else printing out sheet music from an online archive on the only computer that had my revised preliminary pages on it. I was like “um, are you gonna be done soon?” etc. Anyway, skipping ahead!

So THEN!!! I’m like “It is time.” And I press “Print” on the computer screen and I press “Print” on my little humnet personal printing website thingy that keeps track of how much money I have to pay months from now when somebody finally charges me for printing my entire dissertation out in the TA Office. I went into the copy room. It was printing! Fancy piece of heavy paper after fancy piece of heavy paper came flying out of the printer. “No jams, no jams,” I pleaded with the God of Printers, who is usually such a vengeful and sadistic God when it comes to me. But no jams!

Then I copied it in the copy machine, onto fancy paper, again praying for no jams. There were none! Except that with EIGHT PAGES left to go, I ran out of paper. I fucking ran out of paper!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Now there is only 30 minutes left and it’s not like I’m gonna run down to the bookstore or whatever! FUCK! WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO MEEEEEE

So I literally just start despondently picking up random pieces of paper that are lying around the copy room, just to see if maybe some of them happen to be this fancy kind of paper that you only use for your dissertation. And you know something? SOME OF THEM WERE. What???? So I found like 15 pieces of it, lying here and there about the room. OMG thank you God of Copy Room!

(note to any of my colleagues reading this: NO! Barbara WAS AT A MEETING. This is why I did such a fuck-up of a job)

Now I have my two huge manila envelopes stuffed with dissertations and various forms. And my other envelope with other forms. And my stack of paper for Grad Division. I have like 25 minutes, I can do it! I run to Grad Division. The lady takes my forms, gives me another form. I sprint over to the grad library and up the stairs. The nice filing lady takes me stuff and counts all the pages and then says, “wait, there’s no abstract.”

!!!!!!

After checking and double-checking and all that bullshit with changing my name etc., I forgot somehow to print out three copies of my abstract. WHAT.

The lady, being nice, actually let me officially file, but said I had to bring the abstracts in sometime, like tomorrow, because clearly I couldn’t race all the way back to the music building, print out the abstracts, and race back there, before the office closed, not to mention taking the new form back to grad division and getting my little letter proving I have a PhD. But my friends, I did all that and more!

So she gave me this other form, which you then have to take back to Grad Division to get stamped, which I did. Then you take that stamped form to the Registrar and you wait for like EVER, sweat dripping off you and you trying to control your breath from all these ill-conceived sprints across campus holding various sheafs of paper to your chest and wishing you’d worn sneakers. One of my colleagues jokes about the “physical fitness portion” of the dissertation requirements and it is TRUE. So much running!!!! Jesus!

So then the lady comes out with another stamped form, this one much fancier, and says, I will never forget it, “Well, you’re ‘doctor Regarding’ now.” Ha! So anticlimactic yet so great. So then I took that form and sprinted back to the grad library and up the stairs and made it back to the filing office with maybe 24 seconds to spare, the lady just getting up from her desk. I thrust the missing abstracts at her in triumph! And took my fancy paper back to the department! And no one was there, so I just sat in a chair for awhile.

THE PUNCHLINE TO THIS BORING STORY is that I didn’t have to file yesterday. I have all day today, I could have gone in today and taken my sweet time. But you know what? No way! The running and the terror made it feel like an accomplishment. It’s such a weird thing, you fantasize and imagine the PhD for so long, starting when you’re like 20 years old, you’re like “Man, I can’t even imagine how totally awesome my life will be if I ever actually get a PhD! WOW!” and then you work toward that goal and you jump through each hoop and you write each term paper and you teach the little music majors about Monteverdi or whatever and try to get them to stop using the word “universal” when they mention Beethoven, and then you sit on your ass for 3 years writing a book about something only a tiny fraction of people care at all about, and anyway by the time you’re actually done it feels not nearly as mind-blowing as you used to think it would feel. It’s more like you just filed some more paperwork–you’re surely used to THAT, by now. So by turning it into a hugely stressful physical ordeal I think I made it feel more real.

Anyway, I do think this is the most boring story I have ever told.

I then had a drink at a super seedy bar with a movie star, like, immediately, which was a funny cap to such a boring tale (he is an old family friend–I didn’t, like, just randomly run into him and he bought me a drink. Also it was Brad Pitt. JUST KIDDING). He found the tale riveting (I shortened it considerably. In fact I think I shortened it to “I just got my PhD! One hour ago!” and he said “WOW.” That is a way better version of this tale, oh when will I learn). Then my brother, whose birthday it was (bought him a jamba juice: it is one big party when I am around), and I, went to a weird art thing in a weird building downtown, and met these girls, and anyway one thing led to another and I ended up feeling like “one of the dudes” in a really weird way, like because I was clearly in the group of my brother and his friend Brian, and then there were these girls we were sort of trying to hang out with. I was like “what am I doing.”

I also drank a $14 well greyhound. Fucking L.A.! Sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the 110 listening to Elton John. THIS I DO NOT MISS.

Today In History:
– I got my PhD
– my brother was born
– the Titanic sank
– Abe Lincoln was shot!

WHAT A COOL DAY

So you may all call me “Doctor” now, and ask me whatever you want! Except for questions about things not in my scholarly purview, which are most things.

In fact, last night Brian was talking about all these bands I’d never heard of, and my brother goes, “it’s so pathetic how little I know about music,” and I said, “I know, me too,” and then we looked at each other and laaaaaaughed