there must be a pony in here somewhere

Sorting data kind of sucks.

I can't imagine a situation in which it doesn't suck. I can imagine gradations of suckiness, e.g., sorting bad data, or sorting someone else's data, or, worse, sorting someone else's bad data. (Yeah, I know who you are, and I sure as hell never envied you that particular job.) But even sorting your own data, even when you are pretty sure -- at least, some of the time -- that there are some amazing moments in your data, it's still a headache. Five and a half notebooks is like a migraine waiting to happen. I haven't even started on the recordings or my 'archive' (a nice name for the unorganized mass of paper and PDF documents I accumulated in Botswana).

I'm trying to meditate past the feelings and just look at the text. In other words, I'm trying to concentrate on what the texts I produced can describe and substantiate and not focus on the sinking feeling best expressed as: I was there for two-plus years and this is all I have? The only way to get past this point is work through the notebooks and recordings until I can see the dissertation.

My father used to tell a joke about a man who had two kids, one an ardent optimist and the other an equally ardent pessimist. He takes them to see a therapist. The therapist puts the pessimist in a room full of toys. The kid crawls into the corner and begins to cry. "Why are you crying?" asks the therapist. "There are all these wonderful toys and I know that if I touch them, I'll just break them..." the child sobs. The therapist hands the kid a kleenex, and tells him to try to relax for a bit.

Then the therapist walks the optimistic kid to a closed door and opens it. The room is full of horse shit. The therapist hands the kid a shovel and says, "OK, your job is to muck out this room." The kid takes the shovel and begins to shovel the manure enthusiastically, a big smile on face. "Why are you so happy?" asks the doctor. "Your brother gets to play in a room full of toys, and you're shoveling horse shit." "Yeah," the kid says, "but with all this horse shit, there must be a pony in here somewhere!!"