I’m writing this from the warmth and safety of our retreat lodge, and it’s quite nice. It seems hard to believe that we’re really down to less than 48 hours here (for some of us) and this winter-wonderland retreat could not have been a better ending to such a semester. I am not here to reflect on the semester however, but to discuss the second half of my ISP period. The reflection will come on Saturday.

The third week of the ISP period provided a more relaxing environment after the chaotic 2^nd week of traveling and largely not being home in Prague. I met with Ondřej Buddeus and Marek Šindelka for interviews this week, and started thinking about how the whole project was going to fit together.

This week I also started revising the two stories. What I thought would be a relatively quick and easy revision process allowing for a quick transition to compiling my journal for the final paper turned into a long, messy and stressful process of frustration and delaying in terms of finishing the project.

Part of the problem was that I was putting a lot of work into typing up the interview transcripts and writing mini (or perhaps not so mini) essays on each of the interviews, analyzing the most important parts of what was said and evaluating my process as the interviewer and what I would do differently next time. However, once I finished the interviews, then I started working on the revisions and I decided to go after the second story first because we had most recently discussed how to change it, and it had significantly less problems than the first story did. The second story (the first one that I wrote) was quite problematic, largely because I was indecisive in which way to specify the conflict in the story (which I had identified as one of the biggest necessities to revise the story).

It ended up I was up late Sunday night writing a three page free write until I had hammered down an improved (and believable) plot/conflict for the story. Ending up being about 1am when I finished, I decided to save writing the story until Monday morning, which was easier that night, but led to some stress for the final week.

The last week, like the second week, was particularly stressful, though because the ISP and it’s multitude of components were due by 5pm on Friday, so the weekend was not a working period this time.

The week opened with my rewriting the first story early Monday morning. Then I reworked the ending to the second story one more time before sending it to Petra. After that, I started compiling the field journal and wrote the essay to the second interview (with Marek). The rest of the week was spent compiling the field journal and writing the final paper for ISP. Nothing terribly exciting: just focusing and stress. It was pretty cool the last few days how we all returned to the school and made it a community effort to work on our ISP Papers, even taking a group study break on Thursday for dinner, where even our AD joined us.

Relief did not come, however, until after I presented my ISP on the following Tuesday afternoon, of week 15. And now we’re down to less than 24 hours of being together as a program, and I’m down to less than 36 hours in Prague/Czech Republic. Weird.

Until Next Time,

Joe