Finishing Revisions - The Roller Coaster of Feelings is Back (Or : My Conflicted Feelings About Academia)

I got the revisions back from the graduate school a few hours ago -- I was glad that they did this quickly because if my dissertation is not accepted by May 16, I won't get to participate of commencement.

I am almost done with the corrections (moving the epigraph page, correcting some errors in the Table of Contents, changing the font size in all chapter epigraphs, correcting the margins in the bibliography, and a few other things), but I wanted to come here and talk about my feelings about this dissertation while they're still fresh.

[I know this is all I talk about, but once this whole thing is over, I'll shut up and NEVER touch this subject again, so bear with me for now]

You know, I kept thinking that all these revisions, that this whole formatting nightmare would make me care less or hate the dissertation and its subject, but nothing of the sort is happening. I am still profoundly interested and invested in this topic and it angers me that it's really not supposed/required/necessary to be that way for one to become part of academia. Perhaps is another reasons why I won't ever get to be part of it, because I'm too much in earnest, I don't really care for the formal aspects of it, the conventions, the "pro forma" stuff that is part and parcel of academic life. Publishing articles, organizing and presenting at conferences, publishing books, even. I'm sure that many people are truly interested and invested in their subjects, but I also think that a whole lot of people just go through the motions, year after year. Otherwise, there would be more genuine enthusiasm at conferences and such.

Yeah, I know, I'm an idealist. I care about things and I want to curiously and passionately pursue them, but that doesn't mean that these qualities will be valued. I don't really have the words to express intelligently and articulately all my feelings on this matter. I obviously don't know enough, I admit that I'm judging a whole lot of people and that I could be wrong. I also don't know if I'm really cut out for academic life. I find teaching extremely stressful, the undergraduates I taught for seven years had almost no interest in what I (or the professor, when I was a T.A.) was teaching. I still feel a fish out of the water in an American University and I have these feelings that part of my problem teaching here is a cultural one (Brazilians are much warmer, enthusiastic people in general, and it's hard for me to deal with the "typical" American students).

Well, anyway, I got carried away, as usual. So let me go back to my revisions and quit expressing these useless frustrations.