Burning midnight oil

Monday was the first day in about a week that I have felt measurably better than crap.  Naturally, I'm risking that precarious degree of recuperation by staying up late to edit my article draft, rather than get extra sleep.  Oh, fuck it, who am I kidding?  I'll get extra sleep anyway, because I'm totally going to blow off my yoga class for the fourth time in a row.  I rationalize this with the observation that there's little point in going to a yoga class when I'm physically unable to breathe through my nose for most of the morning.  So it is that I'm still at the computer at this hour, pounding water, herbal tea, and chicken soup (spiked with dill and cayenne, naturally) to stave off the late-evening discomfort of the stupid cold.

I wanted to have this second draft out the door already, but a week of illness threw off my schedule.  Now I feel the need to hustle, since the whole point of revising the draft was to get a colleague's critique on it in time to incorporate hir suggestions into the final draft I have to submit by the end of May.  I already prepared the quiz for my first class on Wednesday, and I'll be showing a film to the other class that day, so I felt comfortable taking the evening to focus on MY OWN GODDAMN WORK.  Yeah, I said it.

These revisions are kind of a bear, since the essential critique I've gotten so far is to advance the theoretical argument.  It feels much like the diss-writing process, when I'd push my theoretical arguments far enough that my brain felt like a pretzel, only to hear from my committee that I was just laying the foundation and needed to go way further with my arguments.  On the plus side, I'm excited by the direction I'm going in, and I can see dimly ahead some cool intersections with the work of some colleagues I've been dying to cite.  This article is, truth be known, the first really meaningful advance in my analytical thinking since my dissertation.  (The cool stuff that got me the book contract is much more about tangible data than the analysis thereof.)  It's quite satisfying to see a new and unanticipated theoretical intervention taking shape in my work.  That emotional high from crafting something shiny and new is primarily what has given me the energy to focus on my writing after a full day at work replete with irritated sinus membranes and an inexplicable lack of orange juice available for purchase at the café on campus.

But now it is late, and I can feel my brain shutting down for the evening.  I added a good 500 words to the draft, and I think I've figured out a way to answer a thorny potential critique of my analysis, so I'm content to call it a night.  Off to waterboard myself with the Neti Pot, and then to bed.