The most persistent psychological barrier to working on my dissertation is not the intimidating size of the project, or insecurities about its intellectual worth, or a lack of time to devote to it. It’s not even my cac.ophony.org deadline. What keeps me away from the library is the constant barrage of warnings about the doom that awaits the humanities Ph.D. Articles that beg undergrads not to pursue useless advanced degrees arrive regularly in my inbox, forwarded sympathetically from the secure, salaried desk jobs of my smug friends outside academia. Why, I wonder, should I spend my day squeezing one or two footnotes out of hours of reading?
Discouraged, I retreat to the most reliably mindless escapism I know of, a deeply trusted ally in the war against productivity: syndicated sitcoms.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whBrTOzj0Kw[/youtube]
Marge, how could you?
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