Stuttering, stumbling, succeeding?

It has been a strange few semesters in graduate school so far. I started with optimism, passion, excitement, delight and hope. I'm finishing my second semester feeling somewhat disheartened, uninterested, bored even.

While my fellow students are just as smart and engaged as I expected them to be, the issue for me is that they aren't particularly engaged in the same sort of things I am. I got used to this somewhat in sociology, where the idea of studying digital culture was an oddity that was tolerated by my fellow students studying the more serious topics related to race, gender, economics, politics and quantitative research. I had hoped that this more inter-disciplinary program would allow me to connect with like-minded grad students and we could form a community together, arguing theory, trading links and cfps and generally starting to form a network based on our shared interest and passion for theory and digital culture.

What I'm finding is a program that is heavily slanted towards visual culture, art, literature on one side, and politics, political economy, policy reform and the actual hard-core tech of technology on the other side. The theory ideas are there, but in works I'm already quite familiar with for the most part (e.g. Debord, Adorno, Habermas, Baudrillard). Once again, I'm falling outside of those margins and am feeling the lack of others who share my interests.

Case in point -- trying to start taking a stab at some topics that relate to what will be my MA thesis. My end-of-term-paper proposal in a core communications class did not go over well with the professor and I got a stunningly low grade on it. Ego hit aside, I just needed to talk to a few fellow students who'd get my reaction to it, not just to the grade or the professor's reaction, but to the entire topic, and who could help me kick start it and get going anyway and prove to the professor that my topic is, indeed, worthy of being in a communications course. I didn't and don't have that, so I've been stumbling along, starting things, reading a few others, stuttering out some words on digital paper and generally feeling an increasing fogginess of my brain and lack of interest in my topic.

I've had a few pointers to some relevant literature, most notably the work of french theorist Henri Lefebvre. Problem is, his most influential book is checked out at pretty much any Ontario university I try to get it from, and I don't have the luxury of waiting for inter-library loan on this. I'm trying to piece together his ideas from secondary sources, such as Rob Shields' book about Lefebvre's corpus, but I'm feeling somehow like this is cheating a bit. So I debate -- do I pay Amazon.ca the $15 they want to get it to me by Monday morning? And what do I do about the paper before then?

Right around now, with some RAship work also breathing down my neck and two papers due on Tuesday, April 17, I'm feeling more like I'm stumbling towards failure than success.

Oh sure, probably come June, things will feel more positive, but right now? eesh.