“Everything’s going so well!” (Harold Zidler, Moulin Rouge!) and then it went pear-shaped.

Unlike Zidler, I know that this feeling is probably short-lived and recognise that eventually things will probably turn to custard.  I can live with that.

Having spent nearly the last 1 1/2 years, sitting in my office reading with little or no contact with people outside the university, I have finally started interviewing.  Well it turns out that talking to people absolutely rocks and I may actually be enjoying my research now that I am interviewing.  Who could have predicted that the thing that would save my research study was researching? (paraphrase – Michael Scott, The Office).

What a crazy world

In the spirit of the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, I thought I’d remind myself that I have much to be thankful for from a postgraduate perspective.

1. Doing what I love
2. Living where I love
3. Spending time with amazing people
4. Having the flexibility to work when inspired and find inspiration when I am lacking
5. Exercising my brain and occasionally my body
6. Seeing the ocean as much as I want
7. Seeing my family as much as I want
8. Learning and teaching
9. Contributing
10. Knowing that someday I will be done with my PhD and will get paid to have this life

So, I guess this is day 2 and I am preparing for interviews next week.  Besides scheduling appointments in my diary, I decided I should also dust off the interview questions and check them against my theoretical framework and research questions.  I mean even though I am looking forward to getting out there for a chat with participants, I really don’t want to discover 6 months from now that I didn’t ask the right questions.  Well, it isn’t quite as easy as I thought to ensure that I am asking the right questions and now I wish that I had started this a month ago and not a few days before interviews begin.  Unfortunately, here I am and I’ll just need to make do.  Maybe these first interviews will be my pilot?  I guess this is a bit research ala Macgyver.  Now what did I do with the duct tape and chewing gum?

Well, I guess that could be said about every day.  However, I tend to think about it more after I have just sorted a milestone and now the excuses (from the last days of the first part of my life?!) no longer work.  This feels like one of those times.  I have spent the last month or two in a research funk – sick to death of literature review, but unable to start my empirical work until I received ethics approval from the university.  For a good part of that time I completely disengaged from university life and started questioning (again) why I was doing this.  Despite the downside to this phase of depression and self-doubt, the benefit was that I had an excuse for my lack of progress.

Usually I would be mourning the loss of a good excuse, but I am actually feeling quite optimistic about this new phase of my research.  I think that is because part of my empirical research is conducting interviews which means that I actually get to talk to people.  It is amazing how out of touch you can feel after spending months and months in an office reading.  The thought of reconnecting with the people I am studying is actually making me feel a bit giddy.

This rest of my life thing promises to be much better than I feared.  I no longer have images of Office Space, “So that means that every single day that you see me, that’s on the worst day of my life.”  And now see that I this next phase of research might be filled with human contact, progress, and the joy(!) of learning.  Wow!

For heaps of reasons in general (like my computer just crashed), but specifically because I have started scheduling interviews for my research (ethics approval pending) and since I am studying social media use it seemed reasonable to communicate via social media. Well, I am connected to some participants in Facebook so I thought I’d try to send messages within Facebook instead of email. I don’t use the “send message” functionality much, but it crashed 8 times while I was trying to send 4 messages. I am still not sure if they finally went through so I ended up using Twitter to contact everybody. Not the best privacy-wise, but at least it works. Hmmm… wonder if I should rethink my research position….?

Ok, it’s not quite purgatory, but waiting for ethical approval before I start my fieldwork feels a little like, hmmm… well, a waiting game.  I know that I can’t really start talking to people, but I should be doing something, but what?  Should I start making contact and explaining what I am doing?  Should I start making a list of things to do?  Maybe I should work on my theoretical stuff because goodness knows my lit review could use some work.  But if I know me (and I do), for the next week or so I will aimless flit from thing to thing without accomplishing anything using as the excuse that I don’t have my ethics approval.  Maybe I should just take the week off, enjoy the sun, and start my fieldwork refreshed and ready to go?  Well, we’ll see what happens….place your bets.

I have been feeling a bit Benjamin Button this week.  Well, strictly speaking I am not a creepy man-baby turning into a disturbingly good looking pensioner, but I do have this eerie feeling that I am progressing and regressing at the same time.

I am particularly concerned about my ability to communicate.  Five years ago I had no trouble writing and speaking in complete sentences.  I used proper punctuation, capitalisation, and real words that could be found in a dictionary.  Now I find myself using some bizarre txt-speech not only when txting (see I can’t even spell out “text”) but in other aspects of my life.  Am I 20? I have also noticed my clothes have changed since giving up my real job and going back to school.  Of course I don’t wear skirts and jackets anymore, but now I seem to only wear a single pair of jeans which I keep on the floor when they are not being worn.  In the morning before I dash off to school I search for  the jeans which I know are too dirty to wear when I find them cowering under the bed (think Dr. Seuss and those pale green pants with no one inside them).  So am I 12?  No, because I also wear crazy mismatched coloured tees and tops like a founding member of the Red Hat society.  Am I 80?

I guess I really shouldn’t be concerned whether I am coming or going or evolving or devolving and just enjoy the ride (for as long as I can remember it at least).

Well, technically I am not a Kiwi (nor a dog), but I do know how comforting it can be to have a virtual persona that doesn’t share all of my embodied traits.  I started reflecting about this dichotomy of identities again a few weeks ago when a developer I met mentioned that his clients didn’t know he was located in New Zealand.  They communicate via online media (email, chat, blogs, etc), so geographic locales do not necessarily influence their interactions.

What I find particularly interesting, though, is when you go from a virtual to a FTF encounter.  I am getting ready to meet and interview (and be interviewed) by people who I have only known online or have mostly interacted with in virtual environments.  They don’t know what I look like (except for the odd photo) or what I sound like or anything about my in-person demeanour.  In fact, I have actually thought about my appearance (brushed hair, wearing clean clothes) in order to be more presentable than I normally am when sitting about my laptop chatting/blogging.  It is a bit like a blind date, but I already know them, so how do you act?  I must say that even though I am nervous, I am excited as well.  I like my life online, but I am really looking forward to experiencing real life (RL) encounters too.

Do you have a funny RL/virtual friend experience to share?  I’d love to hear about it.

I remember my mum used to have a little tombstone on her desk with those words.  I have the feeling that organisation will never come for me, but at some point what does it matter?  I do keep trying though.  Sometimes I think that I switched to an academic career in hopes that people would become more tolerant of my disorganisation.  I guess I am hoping for that absent minded professor aura.  Although, somehow I doubt that constantly being late (and unprepared) for meetings and trailing bits of paper as I walk down the hall is ever going to be endearing.  Annoying?  Irritating?  Perhaps, but being disorganised is only a loveable quirky personality trait in the movies.

What’s worse, I think my disorganisation is spreading from my habits to my thinking (was it the Wizard of Oz that said, “You, my friend, are a victim of disorganised thinking”).  When I write, its a mess lately, so I am really beginning to take this organisation thing a bit more seriously.  So how does one get seriously organised?  [drum roll] – you buy a diary.  Because if life has only taught me one lesson, it is you can buy/consume your way out of any predicament.

So that is how a found myself in the stationary store this morning as I walked to school.  Because if I only had a paper diary to schedule my life (electronic calendars don’t count), then I would be completely organised.  I did find a few flaws in this line of thinking, though, as I went down the diary aisle.  One big problem is that apparently stationary shops have a bias against disorganised people and only carry stock for organised people.  This came as a shock to me as I perused the shelves looking for a 2009 calendar, only to find that they are only stocking 2010 calendars.  What?!  Don’t tell me that I am the only person in Dunedin who has waited 10 1/2 months to buy a diary!  There are still a good 80 odd days left in 2009.  Who wouldn’t want to pay for and carry around an extra unused 280 pages?  Hmm… so what options do I have?  Wait for 2010 (appealing, but seems contrary to my goals…), no I did the only reasonable thing I could think of as I realised that I was late and need to get something quick and dash off to school.

I bought a blank book.  You know, so I could fill it was my hopes and dreams… yeah, right.  I bought a blank book so I could print my Outlook calendar and tape it in to it and spend the rest of my life trying to synchronise them.  Fun.  Now what did I do with that diary?  What happened to my tape dispenser? Who took my printouts off the copier? Where’d I leave the keys to my office….

I have decided to resume blogging after many months of silence.  It would be nice if I had a real reason for my absence, but laziness is probably the most truthful excuse.  Essentially I started Twittering, @faniemi, and found it easier to tweet 140 characters of stream of consciousness than to put in the effort to blog.

So why did I return?  The short answer is that I have started the empirical part of my PhD research and I needed a place to reflect.  I could (and do) keep a private diary of fieldnotes, but I like the communal nature of a blog and want the chance to bounce ideas off of people as part of the research process.

So here I am.  Over the next few weeks I’ll be gearing up again and tidying up the site.  I should probably also consider hosting the blog myself and getting a better name.  My study is on how software developers problem solve in online environments, so if you are interested in participating, let me know.

Cheers,
Fa