I love to eavesdrop
Even when I was working on my dissertation, I read journal articles that weren’t specifically connected to my dissertation. Of course, when I was working on my dissertation, I thought everything was connected to my dissertation, so my perception was clearly altered. But I remember one wonderful day during the summer of 2006 (I wrote the bulk of my diss that summer) when I carried a journal around with me all day and managed to eek out enough 10-15 minute reading sessions that I got all of Carmen Kynard’s "'Y'all Are Killin' Me up in Here': Response Theory from a Newjack Composition Instructor/SistahGurl Meeting Her Students on the Page” read and annotated. That was a good day and a wonderful article. The article was only tangentially related to my diss and reading that article felt like a wonderful indulgence.
Now that my diss is done, I seem to have less time to read journals. I still haven’t figured that one out—where is all the “extra” time everyone kept telling me would appear after I finished the diss? But I do manage to read a few article every month. I had an ambitious plan to read two articles a week over the summer—that was a miserable failure. I might have read two articles a month. But two articles a month is better than no articles a month. Without journal articles, I think I would feel very alone, even with blogs.
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