What the heck is this all about?

Part One

Really, this is a question that I get a lot, although especially from my family and boyfriend. I suspect the only question I get more is, "what the heck are you wearing?", but that usually comes from my dad. It's almost a running joke. Almost.

In terms of background, I live in a fairly small city in Canada, on my own, in an apartment full of books and other assorted things (yeah, shoes too, I admit it). I'm a doctoral candidate finishing my third year and working on my dissertation. My research isn't really important here - suffice it to say that it's markedly removed from...well...most of the stuff that I'm hoping to work on and work through here.

So, then, what am I doing here? And what's with the title?

Well, the title is borrowed from a Van Morrison song, and I've posted the lyrics here. I started listening to it a lot recently, and thought it would make a great blog name, but it also seemed like it worked well with some of the things I was trying to puzzle through in terms of my life-at-large (as opposed to my life-as-academia.)

I sometimes feel like a dweller on the threshold, although I'm not always sure of what that threshold is. I do academic research, but the ivory tower is, in many ways, so far removed from other elements of my life, especially given my specific focus. So, I exist somewhere between these two worlds, one where I do academic research on fairly technological subject matter, and the other where I have a baby garden on my patio, knit socks for myself, cook vegetarian food, and concern myself more and more with environmental and food security issues.

To a degree, I've supressed this latter part of my life. Academic takes up so much of my time, and tends to come first. But more and more I feel like my interests here (fromerly dealt with only in the summer and those odd moments when I don't have things immediately due) need to be addressed in some way. They certainly won't take over from my academic life, but I think they need some more inclusion, because right now they're so very separate.

Of course, this isn't to say that these two things have to be mutually exclusive. It's just that I feel the divide very acutely at some times, and I'm not always sure how to reconcile it. Some of these concerns are making their way into my academic life a bit more as time progresses, but the divide is still there. I don't even think that I can work it out through here necessarily, but I at least want to give voice to these things and give them a bit more actual rather than just theoretical space in my life.

So, although I'm not as metaphorical as good old Van, I guess I feel like a dweller on the threshold of something new in my own life, or at least of something that's an increasingly source of concern and focus. And I hope, at least in some small way, to figure out what this is that I'm dealing with, and how I can better integrate it at least into my world, if not into my work.