my schedule, and a word about angels

So, first, my schedule. (Yes, I am a rock star.)

• 6-18 November: Chicago
• 18-25 November: Bay Area
• 25 November - 27 December (or so): Arizona, chez mes parents
• 27-30 December (or so): on the road between Phoenix and Chicago
• 30 December (or so) - who knows?: Chicago

Yes, I have a plane ticket. In fact, I have several. They're not exactly in my hot little hands -- when was the last time you used a paper ticket, anyway? -- but they are in my hot little inbox. In what is less than three weeks, I will hit the Johannesburg, Frankfurt, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix airports. They say if you're going to go out, go out with a bang. I think I've got things in reverse.

I swear, after this, no more conferences. None. Not for a long while. I am going cold turkey. I am going to hole up in wintry Chicago and put my head down: Teach. Write dissertation. Work out. Sleep. Repeat.

Wrapping up fieldwork sucks, and I'm not even talking about packing. I'm talking about coming face-to-face with the vast number of loose ends that are never, ever in a million years going to be tied up. I'm talking about the aggravating fact that 'the social' (or whatever we're supposed to be studying) never stops rolling along, and it takes an act of incredible will to walk away from it and go write about a particular moment of it instead. I'm talking about the frustration of realizing I have spent more than two years chasing one particular angel dancing on the head of one particular pin and that bitch still won't talk to me.

That said, beyond all the things I know I'll miss about Botswana, I think I'll miss chasing that angel. Even if she is a stuck-up little tramp.

What won't I miss? I won't miss being one of three anthropologists in the entire freaking country. I won't miss mooning over my colleagues' bookshelves when I visit them down south, or the embarrassing giddiness that comes over me when I get to talk shop. I won't miss the constant turmoil in the pit of my stomach that comes from the feeling that I should always be working, or the fear that I'm in the wrong place looking at the wrong thing, and that whatever it is I'm supposed to be looking at is around the corner, just out of sight. I won't miss the unshakable conviction that someone else -- probably someone I know -- would be doing this better, harder, deeper, etc. I'm ready to be done with those feelings. I know that as I approach dissertation writing, I'm simply swapping one flavour of anxiety for another. At this point, however, even a difference in flavour seems welcome.