What prospectus?

I've been a little lax with the posting lately, I know, but I've been terribly distracted these days by my prospectus. For those non-academics out there, the prospectus is basically your dissertation proposal. It explains what topic you are going to research, why no one else has done it your way before, and how you're going to go about things. In my department, the prospectus is a 20-30-page paper that is presented to the department at a public 'defense.' Although my colloquium (i.e. public defense) is not until December 10th, I'm supposed to turn in the paper itself at the end of this week.

It hasn't been going very well. I've been struggling a lot with the paper and ultimately with what I want or need (future career-wise) my dissertation to be. I'm still not exactly sure that I know what I'm doing, or that I'm at all happy with what I have produced at this point.

So what did I do last night to clear my head?



Yes, that's right. I went to see Megadeth!
The show began on an interesting note with one of the opening bands. They'd set up these frames with fabric stretched over them to cover stuff behind them on the stage - identical frames were posted at either side of the band. At first I couldn't figure out what the image was:



And then it became clear that it was an image of a dead, mutilated woman, in a flowing robe, arranged poetically on the ground.


I love when people say there is no such thing as the 'male gaze.' It's bad enough in hip-hop, but I'd forgotten the physical violence associated with the 'male gaze' so frequent in metal. I officially loathe the band Suicide Silence.

But anyways, the person who I don't loathe, is this guy:


Dave Mustaine! Snarling champion of my ninth grade year!



I used to watch the video for 'Sweating Bullets' over and over and over in 9th grade: that was back in the day when you'd have a blank VCR tape in the machine so you could super-fast hit 'record' whenever one of your favorite songs came on MTV. It was unreal to see Megadeth standing in front of me, in real life.

Dave Mustaine is a god. Look, he even has a Guitar of Light:



Today I'm still partially deaf, my throat is hoarse from screaming, and my body aches like I'm decrepit. In other words, it was aaaww-suum! *singsong voice*


I went with Dallas and Brian. Afterwards we had midnight bacon-cheddar-cheeseburgers. Now it's noon and I'm wondering how I'm supposed to start coherently writing. I think I might just watch 'Sweating Bullets' a few more times instead.