I said what?!

So, in my last blog entry, I mentioned that I was beginning the writing of a massive paper for a study I'm doing on attitudes about death and dying and the meaning-making that people engage in about it. I said the writing was about to begin.

Since then, I have been at my computer diligently, typing my poor little fingers to the bone.

To be precise, I have typed -- in 11-point Gill Sans, single-spaced, with a double return between paragraphs -- exactly 123 pages.

I'm sad to report, however, that I have as yet to type one goddamned single fucking word of my paper, which is due in a few short weeks. Rather, all those 123 pages account for several hours of interviews done with friends, colleagues and my yoga instructor about their attitudes and meaning-making around death.

And I still have more than three hours of interviews to transcribe, which is about eight or nine more hours of work because it takes so much longer to transcribe than it does to talk.

Let me say one thing here: JesusFuckingGod!

This is a valuable exercise. I am learning more just in the transcription process alone about how people organize their narratives around death. I'm also discovering how, even among people I know fairly well, there is a profound depth of diversity in attitudes and constructs about death, as well as life itself.

It is some really rich shit, man.

S2, for example, gave an amazingly succinct interview, utterly packed with useful quotes. It's almost as if she had been coached thoroughly by those who teach politicians to deploy sound bytes. Except for what S2 had to say was dripping with content; it's not at all the kind of fluff from which sound bytes are extracted. I suspect I am going to have to restrain myself from quoting her too often. I am a sucker for a good quote and always have been. Hers are like meaty, fleshy, tasty nuggets, densly packed and never trite.

Other subjects were more "story" oriented. The Florist, for example, shared a wild story about getting malaria, but then, for gravitas, provided some vivid examples of how nearly dying can radically overhaul one's life. Several others shared stories about how they almost drowned. And some talked at length about their feelings of guilt when others died, while they went on living.

For someone who loves a good story as much as I do -- and who also feels enriched when others share their thoughts on just about any subject, but especially the taboo ones -- this is like hitting the mother lode. I will mine it as deeply as I can.

But it is also annoying as hell, for example, to transcribe for HOURS the dialogue of someone who says "like" and "you know" repeatedly, as in, "She was, like, all like twitching, you know, and so I go, 'Hey, what's up with that,' you know, and she like goes, 'Like, what did you expect?' to me, like that."

I was, like, about to, like, kill myself, you know, when I was done transcribing that, you know? I was just totally done, man.

*sigh*

And then there are people repeat themselves excessively. At some point in my transcription, I found myself wanting to yell, I got it already! OK? I got it!

Some just went into excruciating detail. I asked one participant to "give a little biographical information" about herself, "whatever you think might be pertinent to this." ELEVEN MINUTES LATER, I'm caught on tape saying, Ah, thank you for that soliloquy. When she apologized and reacted in horror to learn I would be transcribing, I replied, It's OK. You were just warming up. So for my first question....

Additionally, because people often share more than they intended to in interviews like this, I am sending the transcripts to all the participants and inviting them to edit them -- to omit comments they never want to see in print or simply to clarify their comments. Some are taking me up on that; others are letting the interview simply be what it was.

The upside to all of this, though, is that I have some wonderful references, some really descriptive, beautiful narrative and some keen insights to use in my piece. For whatever reason, it has been difficult to find good references on meaning and death, so my interview subjects have filled in some important blanks for me. Further, their attitudes and experiences are diverse enough to make a highly interesting paper.

And now that they're typed in (mostly, anyway), all I have to do is cut and paste their comments into my paper.

When I finally get to writing it.