I wanna thank all of you who gave me such wonderful words of encouragement on my most recent rant about my thesis topic... or lack there of. Yesterday, I went to go have a chat with my professor about other possibilities and I am glad to report that I will not be needing a visit to the nut house any time soon... well, at least not until I start doing some actual research anyways. Since I refused to spend the weekend obsessing over my inability to wow my professor with my bright ideas, by Monday I still had no idea what I would even want to suggest to her in office hours. I got to her office an hour before she was set to see anybody because I wanted to make sure I was the first one in the chair. There was no way that I was gonna spend half of my day away from campus NOT away from campus. To my surprise, the sign up sheet was blank, so I whipped out my pen and claimed the #1 spot.

What to do for an hour in a hallway? Think of other possible topics of course. In our last class, you know, the one where she told me in so many worlds that my ideas sucked, I also remembered something else that she said, "if you had nothing else to do for a day or weekend, what would you be doing? This would be one of the things that means a lot to you." In other words, focus in on something that you enjoy and think about how you can make that into a research project... that will last an entire semester. So, I sat on the bench outside the door of the Gender & Women's Studies Department, put my backpack down and put my thinking cap on. What are the things that are closest to me? What is it that effects me deeply? Two things immediately popped into my mind: Mental Illness and Rape/Domestic Abuse/Statute of Limitations. Surprised are we?? I have to admit, I didn't want to go down either of these roads, not because they are not worth talking about and definitely not because there isn't research to be done, but because they are pretty depressing subjects. I wanted to work on something that would excite me, make me happy about the things that I uncovered about it, the possible questions that I'd be able to answer, but quite honestly, besides my daughter, nothing like that is really bold in my life right now. I really am more focused on deeper, darker issues at this point.

So, some questions that I had regarding this issue were, 1. What level of importance does mental illness hold in our culture? 2. How is mental illness represented in our culture (film, news, advertisements)? And 3. How do these representations directly affect those who are dealing with mental illness? And don't even get me started on the affects of having wear the labels of these mental illnesses, as if being branded with a permanent defect sticker.

As you can see, there are many things that I could do here, but then there is the other issue, which is as equally important. You can see from yesterday's post that the issue of domestic violence and abuse is freshly in my mind. There are plenty of directions that I could take these topics in, but the thing that interests me the most are the laws around the protection of women (and children). What the hell is really up with this Statute of Limitations law that basically slaps victims of rape and sexual abuse in the fact with a big old bat with injustice engraved on it? I mean, why is it that people can be prosecuted for murder 50 years after the offense, but rapist have a window of 5 or 7 years to be convicted? And this law isn't even in effect in all states, in fact, a woman who was attacked in the 70's helped to change this law in NY. So, I am interested in knowing when this law came into effect and what was the thinking behind it? What led up to the creation of this law and also, what stakes and influences does the medical community have in the creation of these kinds of laws?

I pitched these ideas to my professor and she got out her pen and paper and got right to work zeroing in on the Statute of Limitations as a focus. She liked it, so much that she started pulling out law journals for me to look at and giving me some advice on how I can get started in my search of California law around this issue. I think its safe to say that my security in writing has been restored.