Me, My Dissertation, and I

Fieldwork, it is a right of passage. It is a joy and it is a pain. It is excitement and it is fear.
I'm leaving tomorrow. I will be gone until April.

This doesn't impact that many people greatly as I may as well be on the moon for as much as I've kept up with folks the last 5 years. The PhD had to become more of my life than a job for awhile and it will consume me to some degree over the next year as I immerse myself off and on back in Chiapas. Afterwards though, it will be a job again. I am committed to this. I will write, I will work, I will have a life. I owe a couple of colleagues major thanks for helping me come to this revelation.

That said. I'm going into the field--literally. I will be in and out of touch. This old-fashioned communicating tool, the blog, is what I will do to broadcast myself. Stop in if you care to, follow-by-email, or get updates.

I've been missing people for awhile now. Being away and in the unfamiliar makes the pain of being away more acute--no matter where I am.

So, I'm off to the fields of coffee farmers, I will participate in the coffee harvest, I will observe the sale of beans to cooperatives and to fair trade coffee roasters...and so on.