I've turned in my two research designs for my methods class. Now all I have left is my lit review for my thesis...and I'm crashing...I'm crashing hard...falling down in flames and crumbling chunks of ash.

I don't know exactly why. I think it stems from bouts of persistent insomnia and restless sleep at various key points throughout this semester. I think it has to do with a lack of clarity for my future and my career prospects in academia or elsewhere. It probably has something to do with the fact that we're interviewing for junior faculty hires...and every time I go to hear a candidate give their "job talk" I panic at the notion of me standing up there in front of senior faculty...big name academics and having them say things like "So, how exactly is this sociology??" or "Has it ever occurred to you that you are approaching this from a completely wrong framework??" or "Have you considered perhaps that the two ideas with which you are dealing are just isomorphic concepts???" I tremble at having to answer those huge, overwhelming critiques to the faces of people whom I've just cited in my work.

I think it also has to do with my struggle with what I've come to call the excessive empiricalization of sociology. I want to write grand theory a la "The Elementary Forms..." or "The Protestant Ethic..." I don't want to write things that appear in the Journal of Teeny-Tiny Irrelevant Windows into the Things About Which No One Cares.

I think it also has to do with the fact that I have the perfect dissertation all planned out (and even wrote a simplified version of the design last week for my class!) and instead I'm working on a thesis about which I'm dispassionate and I think doesn't really matter in the long run...at least not as much as my big question. I'm dreading the thought of running regression analysis that don't really tell me anything about the world, or men, or fatherhood...but instead tell about how well my data "fit" a completely abstracted model of statistical regression.