Come on Pretty Baby Call My Bluff, 'Cause for You My Best Was Never Good Enough

So here's an admission that hardly puts me in the minority of grad students. I have some perfectionist tendencies. I'm almost never happy with my work. I know perfectionism's supposed be bad because it's keeping me from being happy and it's unhealthy and blah, blah fucking blah, but fuck that. I want the work to be good, so cram it Dr. Phil.

Except that right now I happen to be gunning to finish my dissertation, so spending two days getting the language and organization of a single paragraph exactly right isn't going to work. The problem, of course, is that you can't just turn the perfectionism off when it won't work with your schedule. So I'm fucked, right?

Actually, no. It turns out getting the shit kicked out of me on the job market's been really awesome for making me not fucking care about the quality of my work. I wrote a sucky paragraph this morning, and when I reread it and realized just how deeply sucky it was, I thought, "Fuck, that paragraph sucks. I should really fix that." Then I stared at it for another minute or two before thinking, "Fuck it." And then I kept writing.