I am seriously lacking motivation to do much of anything. I’m not sure why, but I think part of it is that I’m traveling more for school this term than I was before, and it’s messing up my internal rhythms. I have a seminar Tuesday afternoons and I’m doing research on Wednesdays, which puts me away from home right in the middle of every week. I feel like I’m always either gearing up to leave or settling in after being gone, and it’s throwing me off my game.

I’m also struggling with the class I’m taking right now, Gender Theory. As I mentioned before, it’s in Swedish, and the subject matter is very unfamiliar to me. Luckily the professors are allowing me to write in English, and a good bit of the course literature is in English, but I have a difficult time expressing myself coherently and intelligently during the seminars. I keep wanting to tell everyone in the class that my Swedish is much better than my in-class contributions might lead them to believe. I’m just very far outside my comfort zone there, and I find myself easily tongue-tied.

In other news, work on the thesis is going well enough. I still feel pretty good about my progress, and I have a few feelers out for more resources. We’re supposed to submit outlines at a seminar at the end of the month, and I think I should be able to do that without too much trouble. I’m a little apprehensive about the real writing part later on, but we’ve arranged for the little girls to go to preschool every day from 8.30 to 3:00 starting in January, so I should be able to get in a lot of hours of concentrated work time. Also, I won’t be traveling much at all after the early part of December, and that should make things a lot easier.