I just heard this week that my last committee member is not only ready to sign off on my dissertation, but has already done so. I've been waiting for her comments since September and getting this news is a huge relief.
I'm currently in the midst of applying for academic job (4! woot!), so I am prioritizing finishing my applications before making the final round of diss revisions. I still have another editing round, some comments from my 3rd reader, and more shitty word formatting to fix (when I copied and pasted it didn't copy and past the captions tags on most of my illustrations, meaning word only pulled info for 1/2 of my figures when generating the figures list), but the end is definitely in site. I feel confident that I can finish the applications and submit the final dissertation by the end of October. Which is good because, you know, I've also got that whole "baby" thing to figure out.
I haven't been on much because September has been a very busy month. This month I:
-Turned 33. woohoo! I seriously love being in my 30's - though I don't love sober birthdays.
-Sung in my Temple's High Holy Days choir. I love singing, thought this would be for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur evening... but it also meant singing at Selichot, 3 hours of day services on Rosh Hashanah, and 6.5 hours of day services on Yom Kippur. It was fun, but a lot of music and exhausting and time consuming. That being said, I feel pretty bad ass being able to sing Soprano easily at 8 months pregnant w/ very little lung capacity.
-Did a midrash at Shabbat - This is basically a commentary on the weekly Torah portion. The rabbi asked me if I'd be interested in doing this for one of our shabbats. My thought process went something like: "moi? discuss textual interpretation in front of a room full of people? Of course!"
-Underwent a ritual/met with a bet din (rabbinical court) to clear up my parentage. That sounds stranger than it is :) You see, I'm a proud patrilineal (father descent) Jew. I, and pretty much all the rest of the world, consider myself Jewish full stop. However, Judaism is generally traced matrilineally unless you were born of Jewish father and raised as a practicing Jew (I often wonder if there's a certain number of shabbats you had to attend or maybe become bar/bat mitzvah to meet the qualifications). I grew up culturally Jewish at the temple of Bagels & Lox, and Gilbert and Sullivan in Yiddish, and got more into the "practicing" part later on. Which means... for some people I don't ritually "count". This has become increasingly important to me as I've gotten older and especially once I became pregnant. So I met with the kinder, gentler, rabbinical version of a qualifying exam and am now a full member of the tribe. Sounds strange? It is. And I have very mixed feelings on the matter (mainly b/c I think patrilineal Jews are Jews end of story, but on the other hand have no problems sitting down with 3 learned people and impressing the hell out of them - it might become useful later on). And it's given me the excuse to tell people rather crudely that now I've "koshered my birth canal" which I think has replaced L and I "living in sin" as my new favorite phrase.
Yes, it's been a very, very Jewish September around here.
-Received notice that my diss has been approved and all I need to do is submit.
Baby shower in Phoenix this weekend - onward and upward.
yay!
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