On to the Next One

Well, it's really done now. 

On Wednesday, I drove 11 hours back and forth to Philadelphia to deposit my dissertation.  So I think that means I'm officially done?  I don't know.  I think I don't technically get awarded my degree until December.  And then it will take another 2 months for the degree to actually arrive.  They only do one Commencement ceremony a year, and that isn't until May.  (I haven't decided if I'm going to go to that.  It depends on who they get as their Commencement speaker.  To really celebrate Penn's Philly cred, I think they should get Ryan Howard or ?uestlove.) 

But, of course, work never ceases.  I need to turn my attention to the conference paper I'm giving at SEM in a week.  SEM this year is back in Philadelphia, which is adding to my confusion about being done.  I seem to always do this fade-out with cities--I never can leave them all in one go.  I left New York and moved to Philadelphia to go to graduate school at Penn, but Catharine was still finishing up at Barnard, so I went back to visit about three times a month.  Then when she moved to Philadelphia, it was rather anti-climactic.  We left Philadelphia and moved to Guatemala/Buenos Aires.  That was rather dramatic.  Except then we moved back to Philadelphia for 4 months before coming to Pittsburgh.  Then I spent last year living in Philadelphia again three days a week.  So you'll excuse me if I have the sneaking suspicion that I might not quite be done with the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Compassion quite yet. 

Anyway, now that the dissertation is officially submitted (coming soon to a ProQuest near you!), I was thinking about posting some excerpts of it here.  Not all of it, but a few things that might be of interest to a wider audience.  If I'm smart about it, I'll even do some hyperlinking and stuff so that you can follow some of the threads that I followed in the writing of it.  (I'll spare you some of the dead-ends that I took along the way.) 

But for now, see you in Philadelphia?  I've got to get to work on this conference paper.