Why writing a dissertation is not fun...

I'm in the middle of writing my dissertation. (and by "in the middle" i mean that i'm currently writing it, not to be confused with being halfway done or anything, because well, i'm not half way done yet.) For those of you not crazy enough to decide to do something which requires writing of a dissertation, generally, the first chapter is the introduction. I usually think of intros as being short and brief, basically just giving the important facts. Well, in this case, the word introduction is incredibly deceiving. You basically write a review of the literature that relates to your project, sparing no detail. In order to do this, I've plunged myself into a constant state of reading journal articles, adding a couple sentences to my intro here and there as I come upon relevant things in my reading. I'm the kind of person who likes to see results of my work (perhaps i should have been a maid or some other job where you can see results of your labor immediately). This work certainly does not fall into that category. I can spend hours and hours working diligently, yet microsoft word still tells me i'm at the same number of pages as i was 3 days ago. I have a stack of papers to read that is about 3 feet high (and, no, I'm not exaggerating...i'll bring in my camera to document that fact tomorrow). My "done" pile (papers I've read and feel like i've thoroughly written about in my dissertation) is probably about 3 inches high, and the pile of papers i've read that i'm just not sure how to incorporate is getting pretty thick as well.

Here's the major thing that just about gives me a panic attack every time I start thinking about the big picture--It seems like every time I add another paper to the "done" pile, I've found at least 3 more to print out and add to the "i need to read" pile. This doesn't seem very productive to me, and I'm starting to wonder how I'll ever finish if this continues.

I guess right now I should just be happy that I've managed to work for 2 1/2 straight hours on a Saturday evening and have been incredibly productive.

One upside to all of this...I'll probably be blogging much more frequently now that I'm sitting in front of my laptop about 16 hours a day.