Months before defending my doctoral thesis, Jimmie, the southern civil engineer I was dating, joked that he would sit in the back of the room in his cowboy hat, and if things heated up, put on his thickest twang, cock his rifle and drawl, “I reckon that was one question too many.” I laughed so hard, my face hurt. I related the joke to my advisor. She needed the comic relief nearly as much as I did. In the weeks before my defense, she was missing sleep to meet with me by phone. Her goal was to help me polish my thesis to such perfection that no one on my committee would raise a fuss at my defense. No one did.
However, when the editing process was particularly aggravating (and everyone was warning me that Mercury had gone retrograde… lovely), I had the most comically bizarre dream of my life, one that gave me a new perspective. Before describing the dream, I should mention that the topic of my thesis was social disgust, or more precisely, the relationship between physical disgust and social disgust. Social disgust is the emotion that arises when we witness inhumanity or cowardice. Like the fundamentalist group that protested at a children’s funeral because someone slashed their tires after they protested at a military funeral. “That literally makes me feel like throwing up,” a friend said. My goal was to understand how things like cowardice, or more interestingly, deep human need, come to evoke actual revulsion.
I should also relate the following. My advisor gave extremely high praise to my theoretical writing, but when she waded through the results of my data analysis, my unnarrated delivery drove her crazy. She felt as though I’d simply dumped the data into the thesis. The analysis was sound. I followed the approach set by previous researchers whose experiments became a template for my own, but the write up was awful. In my defense (figuratively speaking), I wrote up the results while fending off two young boys and a plumbing disaster that turned my house into a toxic dump for two days. The landlord, the plumber, and the carpet guy had the house torn up by the roots to clean and fix the problem while my two boys and I got very ill.
The editing process became a roller coaster ride of aggravation and euphoria. I had faith though. When I first came up with the idea more than two years ago, I spent several hours writing a research proposal in which I described in vivid detail a number of physically disgusting scenes. In the midst of my writing, I remembered to take out the trash, and for the first time in more than two decades, I encountered a gallon of maggots at the bottom of the trash can. As I hosed them out in the backyard, the coincidence did not escape me.
After years of research and writing on my own, my advisor recovered from a serious illness and returned to guide me, but I could afford only one more semester. On the phone with my mother, she asked me if my plan was realistic. “Can you complete your thesis in a matter of months?” she asked. As I struggled to answer her question, I discovered a gallon of maggots on my kitchen floor. I would have gagged, but the coincidence was so striking, I simply told my mother, “Yes, this is going to happen.” The last time I’d seen maggots was the day I’d come up with the idea for my thesis. It took me three hours to clean them up, because they began appearing on every tile of my kitchen floor. They had no identifiable source. The ceiling fixtures, perhaps. (I wrote about it in: When Good Dreams are Bad Signs) I resolved to study love and joy and flowers and butterflies after graduation.
In my dream in the weeks before my defense, a claymation play featuring cute little critters unfolded before me. The little critters squirmed and scampered playfully. I felt much fondness for them. Then a big, black, furry bug made of thick pipe cleaners moseyed along and ate them all. “They’re gone!” I cried. I mourned.
The big black bug joined similar others. I watched their activity for some time as though it were a David Attenburough nature show. The little critters seemed a distant memory.
Suddenly, one of the big black bugs began to, well, poop. Cute claymation poo! (I am embarrassed that my brain made this. Sigh.) As the poo tumbled out, the scene opened to a cross section of the poo, and I could see inside. Hidden within the poo were rows of seats like a roller coaster, and in each seat was a cute little baby swaddled in white. I never imagined something so adorable could represent a maggot. Ick. They were all screaming with delight, a familiar amusement park sound, and enjoying the ride. I basked for a long while in their blissful glee.
A dream of renewal. Coming back to life. I mean, if you think about it, what does “rebirth” look like for a maggot? Eeew. I woke up laughing (albeit slightly horrified at my imagination), and after that, the ups and downs surrounding my graduation stopped worrying me.
Which is fortunate, because I was in for one more giant plunge. On the night I had my dream, my advisor cornered my co-advisor at a faculty dinner. Almost twenty years ago, when I was working at a fast food restaurant in Arkansas, I read about my future co-advisor in a book from the library. I dreamed of one day meeting him, and here he was, about to read my graduate thesis. A virtual celebrity, my co-advisor’s frequent trips to India made an in-person defense impossible. After his lack of replies to my messages, however, my advisor pleaded with him to conduct a defense via conference call before his next departure four days later.
Without his approval, I would not graduate, and I had no way of enrolling again. I prepared for the call, which took place three days later (and one day before his departure for India). When he answered the phone, he apologized that he’d not found time to read it. He was leaving for India the next morning, for a town so remote, he’d be inaccessible until the end of the semester.
The next morning, my advisor and I contacted the graduate school with pleas to replace my co-advisor with another professor. I was ready to make the twelve hour drive up for my defense in just two days. The city was shut down by a blizzard. Nevertheless, we attempted to set that change into motion.
Later that afternoon, my co-advisor called me from his plane. In the terminal, he had found time to look at my thesis. I was driving on the highway, but I reached my grandmother’s house and got situated with a pad of paper and pen. With the graduation deadline only days away, he had only a few words to give me.
“I don’t understand why you analyzed the data this way. Unless you redo the analysis using a different approach… and that means you’ll need to create new tables and figures, I can’t sign off on this.” A period of silence passed. He was essentially asking me to completely rewrite a third of my thesis. Perhaps half. The fact that I’d followed a published procedure employed for a similar set of data on the same topic simply escaped me. My choices were defensible, but he hadn’t asked me to defend them.
“There is no way I can redo my analysis and rewrite the results and conclusions in one day,” I said.
“I sympathize with your personal predicament,” he said, “but I don’t know what to do. As it stands, this does not meet minimal standards.” My thesis went from “one of the best in years,” according to my advisor, to “below minimal standards” in a heartbeat. The roller coaster of poo!
“Okay” was all I could say before ending the call. I slumped onto the kitchen table, unable to focus my eyes or close my mouth. I went into shock. A genuine, bona fide acute stress response. I called my advisor, shaking and incoherent. “I’m not going to graduate,” I said. She struggled for an hour to wrap her mind around his feedback, which some would say centered on a mathematical matter of opinion. A “quibble.” We finally got off the phone, both of us at a total loss.
My grandmother gave me a warm meal and a glass of whiskey.
As it happens, just one hour before he called, the graduate school had successfully and officially replaced my co-advisor with someone else, a statistics professor who gave me guidance with the data analysis one year before. When my co-advisor offered his feedback, he was no longer on my committee. All was well. We brought up his comments at the defense, and no one thought the analysis needed to be redone. The requested changes were minor, and I graduated the next day!
Weeeeeee!
My advisor took me out to dinner to celebrate. Jimmie and two dear friends joined us. She brought up his joke. I cringed, but Jimmie did his bit for everyone–tipping his imaginary hat, cocking his imaginary rifle. Everyone laughed. After returning home, I went shopping for thank you cards and stumbled on a card with a photo of Buddhist monks riding a roller coaster. I have to admit, my claymation maggots were way cuter.
After writing the above post, I found this video in a YouTube search for “claymation.” Interesting coincidence with the whiskey. And I thought my imagination was bizarre!
