My first educational book came in at the library, along with seven comic books that I’d had on hold for a few weeks. At least they’re pretty quick to read?
Tag: indie thesis
Three indie thesis tips, while I get organized
I’ve talked to about four people since I declared ““thesis on!”:/2006/08/10/i-call-it-an-indie-thesis” and already I’m overwhelmed by notes. I’ve got this grand plan involving a wiki, but while I get the squirrels up to speed, here are three solid tips that have immediately become apparent.
3 tips for learning to write a thesis without going to school
- People love to talk about their own education. Sir Ken Robinson’s excellent, funny presentation about education from TED 2006 covers this, and so far it’s my experience as well. My friend Towagh just gave me about three hours worth of explanations and advice about Masters work, starting from “OK, a thesis… what’s that?” (Thanks, Towagh!)
- If you are going to have a three hour meeting over coffee, pick somewhere with a convenient restroom.
- A tip from Towagh that strikes me as hilarious: if you want to talk to a professor, even an imposing, famous professor, call up their Department and ask for their office hours. Do many non-students sneak into office hours? I’m a little suspicious that I should keep this tip under my hat, that I might encourage the one yahoo who will abuse Office Hours and ruin it for all of us. (You know, all of us who want to talk to professors about critical problems without enrolling in school.) It will be a sad day, when office hours have some type of warning sticker attached.
Got any thesis tips of your own? I’d love your comments. (And I should mention: I’d love them even if you’re from the future, and you’re reading this in 2012 and you presume the conversation is dead. I’m posting here while the site is still semi-secret, so don’t feel like a latecomer.)
The best thesis since Xena
I helped my granny pick her peach tree on the weekend, so I took the opportunity to explain my new thesis project to her and ask for her input about mortality and dying.
She’s 86; she grew up on a farm; she’s had her funeral and burial plans pre-paid for years; she tells a story about her experience speaking with the spirit of her recently deceased sister; and we often have conversations about my grandpa’s advanced Alzheimer’s dementia and the merits of burning out versus fading away (elder nursing home version). I thought she’d have lots to contribute.
The first thing out of her mouth?
“Oh darling, there’s a book I’ll have to give you when I’m finished. It’s about one of those… those men who never die? (Well he could die in a fight, but not of old age.) And he’s supposed to hunt evil? It goes back centuries. Just centuries.”
(The name she’s looking for is Dark Hunter, and he surely owes his existence to Boris Vallejo.)
I know that I need to start narrowing my topic as soon as possible— at the moment I’m reminded of my aunt’s high school independent research project on the entire history of ancient China— but for now, while I scope out the lay of the land, it’s pretty cool to just ask everyone I know if they have any tips or resources about dying, to see all the different angles that pop up. I would not have thought to examine sexualized immortality in post Buffy pulp fiction if granny hadn’t suggested it.
A start: normal dying processes
I’ve heard a lot of stories of dying people needing to get a good sleep before they have enough energy to die, or of dying at contrived times like right before an annoying doctor is due to show up, or right after seeing a new baby relative.
I’m sure a lot of those stories are coincidence, but I’m intrigued by the idea that dying is an action the body takes, rather than an event that just happens when the body fails. Zoe pointed out the other day that many people think of death as a failure of medicine, rather than as a normal event in everyone’s life. To me, thinking of death as an active, biological process makes it seem more like a normal function (which I’m interested in, for now).
This morning I’ve been hunting for information about the normal dying process, and how it varies, and whether there are conflicting models for “normal” death responses the way I’m familiar with different, biased models of sexual response from working on my vagina website (and indeed, Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief seem to draw similar controversy to Masters and Johnson’s model of the human sexual response cycle).
Zen Hospice has a great overview of the physical changes a person goes through as they die, from a hospice perspective. I recognize all of those symptoms from the few people I’ve known at the end of their lives. I can see immediately why there are so many comparisons between giving birth, having orgasms, and dying: all involve extreme physical responses that start to seem normal when you know what to expect. Learning about the physical symptoms of dying feels a little like getting to know the birds in your neighbourhood or something: gaining context.
Graceful Exits:How Great Beings Die apparently deals with conscious dying and dying on purpose, such as the idea of elders wandering off alone into the woods to die. It sounds a bit flaky (i.e., possible use of ambiguous generalizations like “aboriginal cultures”), but still really compelling to me. I’m all for special skills, and this intro sort of makes dying sound like a superpower:
Then the person is left alone. He or she sits down, and within a matter of minutes is able to intentionally close down the body and die.
That would be both more and less useful than being able to cry on command.
But, from my scattered reading this morning, I gather that I should do some searching for literature about “deathing” and “timing of death” rather than the process of dying. It’s a bit weird that “dying” gets used more as adjective than as a form of the verb “to die.” When a person “dies” that describes the moment of death fairly precisely, but when a person “is dying” that could refer to almost any stage of life or illness or injury.
This is the kind of jargon I should figure out soon— it’s hard to organize notes when you don’t know the names for things (and stuff).
I call it an indie thesis
So I have a new project. I’m tempted to be secretive about it (shy!) but it will be more fun if I get this out as soon as possible. Cue the fanfare (I have yet to choose my entrance music, like pro wrestlers have, so maybe you could go with just a big Open Sesame gong noise): I’m writing a Masters thesis. There are a couple of peculiarities:
- I’m not enrolled at a school;
- and actually I don’t have an undergrad degree;
- and my topic idea so far is to figure out what I’d like my own death to be like (the obvious joke being that I’m preparing for my final project in the School of Life).
I’m declaring today my first day of school. For the next two years or so, I’m going to research dying and ideas about mortality (and, if my understanding of mid-life crises is accurate, basically have one of those in an educational fashion), and then make a big, coherent document out of the results.
I’ll be posting here about the research and my ideas about the topic, and also about the process of inventing an education and publishing it on the internet.
I’m excited! I’m mostly self-educated anyway (as are a lot of web designers… and vagina geeks too, actually) and I research things all the time, but I don’t often have obvious milestones in my perpetual education. Maybe at the end of this, I’ll order one of those spam degrees to make it official.
Right now, I’ve got a couple of meetings set up to get input from various folks, I’ve started a list of things to investigate, and I’m working on putting together a well-balanced advisory committee. More on this situation as it develops.