Dissertation dump

I am an articulate person. This is a fact that I believe like I believe that I have brown curly hair and stand 5 feet 9 inches tall. I have always loved writing. I won a prize for a science essay in high school and collected cherished praises from every writing professor. In college, I was an English major before I was wooed away from words by the breathtaking beauty of the insect world. Before bugs, I used to stay up all night working on painfully beautiful critiques of medieval poets. Now I only pull all-nighters for insect collections, posing the shiny exoskeletons of dead insects on tiny black-enameled pins and snipping out labels printed in 2pt font on which you will find only the barest details, unpoetic epitaphs to be read by the tearless eyes of scientists behind magnifying glasses.

I am rapidly approaching the culmination of my PhD-seeking career in Entomology. It's called a dissertation. It's a document containing the justification for my existence for the past 4.5 years. If there were anything which really ought to be written well, this is it.

So why is it that when I mean to write something glowing with competence, clarity, and grace- I get something that sounds like an angry grasshopper bouncing on my keyboard? Choppy, unattractive prose flows from the cursor like a malicious force is confounding any ability to communicate that I once possessed.

Part of the problem is that there's too much there- too much going on at once and no good narrative structure to make it spread out on the page. Every sentence carries the burden every minute of the past 4.5 years like a freight train pulling a thousand cars at full speed into the station. There's no parsing it. It flashes by in a blur. Can I make it slow down just for a minute to write a few sentences? Let's hope so, friends. 'Cause if it's not the light at the end of the tunnel, it might be the train.