More Than Cowboys
Writing my dissertation forces me to embark on a journey down memory lane. Fort Worth, Texas peaked my intrigue. I found it to be more than cowboys.
‘Looking through pictures taken, memories fixed just makes you want to go back and make more.’
Shortly, I’ll be writing about the heritage and culture that embodies Fort Worth to make up one of my three discussion chapters in my dissertation.
It’s not an easy task.
Dividing up the most poignant parts into 1300 words.
Taking one of the oldest cities in the South and deconstructing it into 1300 words.
Not easy.
Very hard.
It’s hard mainly because not only are there many moving parts, but everything seems important.
Similar to my post two days ago about continuing during hard and depressive times, this is no different.
Funnily enough, when I wrote that, I was getting down to writing the first chapter.
Now this is the second chapter.
But actually it’s flipped, this is the first chapter but I wrote them in the wrong order.
Not on purpose, and I won’t say I did it on purpose because I don’t have a reason for why.
Part of my analysis uses pictures.
Postcards I found or self-taken photos.
It’s safe to say I have way too much data.
Because otherwise this would still be hard, but not seemingly impossible.
One thought I remembered though is quite crucial to getting past this fear of impossibility.
The markers, my supervisor and someone else, will never have heard of Fort Worth.
They won’t know what makes the city.
They’ll be interested in the story being told.
The specifics won’t matter as much as the effort to tell a credible story.
One that excites, enlightens and educates.
In the initial stage, I’m writing it for a marker.
I need to paint a picture, a model.
Thinking of it as a model helps a lot.
Because the point of a model is to not replicate reality, but to actually choose carefully what to improve.
The model will be too slow if you input everything.
What is the most important to telling the story.
I can’t lie, I’ve just written that and processed it.
It makes sense, something I’ll employ.
I’m trying to look at three areas in my dissertation.
Made up of two themes each.
That’s how much I could compress it.
Heritage, culture, business, politics, infrastructure and community.
For me, this is what makes the city.
There are other themes such as race.
I’ll have to silence that voice, because while it plays into the perception of Fort Worth; I believe that there are structural issues.
They start with these macro themes.
Fort Worth is known for its supposed redneck and cowboy culture.
But I think it only makes up one-sixth of the picture.
I feel the last chapter will be the hardest to write.
But I need to do it, rough first and perfect it later.
Get the points down.
Dissertation is definitely a marathon.
You need to walk, or even crawl, some of the way to really appreciate its magnitude.
But I love my topic.
I get excited every time I write it.
The city that gave me so (too) much in one month.
The city that needs to be compressed into 5000 words discussion and conclusions.
This is a task that will mark my academic career to date.
More than cowboys