Saying goodbye to a friend from last year, who I will not see again for a long time. Two of pints of cider later (in the King's Arms, amongst the New College rah-rah-rah), I realise I'm coming to the end too.
The end of my time here, the end of the biggest ups and downs I've had, ever. The end of a life I've loved and hated with a passion. Going towards a really uncertain future, with all of the uncertainties of it - where are we going to live? Will we able to stay together? Will I be able to find my way in the world? Will I earn enough to do the things that I now feel I need to do to be happy?
It's scary. In some ways it's less scary than other changes in my life; I know this time I have M., and again I have friends left, my lovely Russian, Carmencita, Char, people I will keep connections with.
Who knows what I'll be doing in a year's time?
My hope is that I'll be back here for the evening, having a drink with my friends.
I will miss Oxford. I really will.
I can't believe this process is over. I thought I would wake up this morning and realise "It's done". But I didn't, I woke up feeling the same. People told me it would be an anti-climax, and they were right.
If I think about the hell that have been the past few months, all of those feelings of being inadequate, the paralysing self-doubt... How can I not be crying out of happiness right now?!?
I guess it'll take a while to sink in. I think I'll also take a while to realise this is the biggest thing I've done in my life, and it might be just silly academia, but it's something.
Yesterday I voiced for the first time something I've known for a few months: I can safely say I will never, ever, be an academic.
And that's a fact.
I am sitting in my department waiting for my thesis to be bound, and then I shall hand in. A whole day early! How exciting.
To be honest, I could have probably done more on it today. But I just don't care enough anymore, and so this is it.
I'll still be walking with my sauntering friend M so he can hand in his tomorrow, so I guess there won't be excessive drinking tonight. I just will be free.
And my exams aren't until the 9th and 10th of June! I might even go home for a week before that...
Oh, and I seem to have started a trend: everyone at Wolfson is now complaining about the gardeners! Joys of joys.
I've just received a final few comments from dear N, who has been one of my loyal proofreaders. And it gave me that list bit of oompfh I needed to get through the final stage of tying it all together in my conclusion.
And people, I do believe I have managed to make a coherent argument, somehow. It just doesn't look so shit anymore because guess what - what I am saying in this thesis is not actually useless! Actually, it could be very useful! Who knew?
And tomorrow: print and bind.
And Friday: hand in and get drunk.
Yay for thesis! Even though it does rhyme with faeces. I blame Carmen. Don't ask.
Reading through my thesis over and over again is making me realise how absolutely mediocre it is. Almost 30,000 words of mediocrity at that. As I said yesterday, editing really is soul-destroying; realising that really, you can't write that well. Not just that, but you pay as much attention to details as a slug.
I don't know why a slug would pay little attention to details, but it would. Promise.
I am toying with my word count, and so have come ridiculously close to the word limit. Ah ah. I don't even want to think about the poor soul who's going to have to read this whole thing, probably a couple of times. I guess they get paid though, right? So it isn't so bad. Not only did I not get paid to do this, but I've actually forked out a good 12,000 pounds (plus living expenses for two years) to do this. How great.
I have to say, I'm not exactly the picture of positivity today.
Must be the bloody lawn mowing (or mown lawing, as I called it earlier) outside my window this morning.
I hate everything and everyone.
The only thing that keeps me going? That bottle of sloe gin in the bar... It's mine. Just wait for it.
I'm only at chapter three (of five, plus the conclusion and methodology appendix which most definitely need editing) and I already want to shoot myself. And I now only have 500 words of leeway for the main body of my thesis. I knew I could count on myself on writing so much rubbish I'd reach the word limit.
ARGH.
At least it looks positively spring-like outside. But I'm sure it won't last long.
List of things I will do starting on Friday, when this... This thing is handed in:
- return all of the 25 books currently sitting on my shelf;
- get very, very drunk (it will go like this: few beers at lunchtime, Pimm's in the afternoon, then more beer for dinner, then spirits and shots, and then I shall die);
- paint my toenails pretty colours;
- buy shoes;
- buy ER season 9 and watch it all in one go;
- also spend a couple of days catching up with all the TV series which are finally starting again (House, Grey's Anatomy, etc.);
- do a lot of killer sudoku;
- start going to the gym again and lose those other 10kgs which are now bugging me a lot;
- spend hours on etsy looking for pretty jewellery;
- wake up at 11am every day for a week and not feel guilty;
- throw away the key to my carrel;
- make cakes;
- sit on the grass enjoying the sun and smoking like a chimney;
- have long coffees with my friends every single afternoon...
I'm sure there's more. I'll keep updating as I think of more things. Ah ah. I'm the goddess of procrastination.
Why do people like tomato juice? It's like drinking soup. Ew.
It seems like in this part of the world, April just does not count as Spring anymore. Today it's yet another rainy, gray day, and I'm craving summer days. I am craving them so much every time I wake up and it's not a summer day, something feels wrong.
I miss those days when you wake up and open the window, and cold air blows in; but it's that special kind of cold air, which already has the feeling of warm summer air in it. I don't know what it is; the smell of growing grass, the humidity. But I miss that moment in the morning when you realise it's going to be a beautiful day so intensely it almost hurts.
This has truly been the neverending winter. I think it started in September, and it hasn't finished yet. I am starting to think I may have Seasonal Affective Disorder. It would explain a lot. For example, the fact that I finally started feeling better and I started writing that one week we had really nice Spring weather. Next year, once a job has been found and a salary has been earned, I might buy myself one of those special therapy lamps. I seriously do not think I can go through another Winter like this one and survive.
Word count: around 29,000.
I am waiting for one of the two people proofreading to come back to me with comments, but so far, nada. I'm not really sure what to do in the meantime, since I've already edited all chapters once or even twice, and so I don't think I can come up with anything that needs changing. It's kind of frustrating and at the same time such a relief to know that I could print out this thing right now and just hand it in as it is. It's also very scary.
Being done with this is going to be such a come down. My hope was that I would wake up the next day and feel free, but... I just don't think it's going to happen. First of all, I'll have to wait until I get the result in June. Secondly, it's just not that satisfying because I have lost so much faith in this institution, this degree...
I think I need something to distract me... Like... Hoovering?
I really should open a cleaning firm. Or a bar. Seriously.
Yesterday I finished the bulk of my thesis, as in, my thesis minus the methodology appendix. Now this is fairly big news, even though there's still a while to go as a couple of people are proofreading it. Anyway, big news; last night I felt absolutely exhausted though, and spaced out, and so I went to bed relatively early, in a bit of a bad mood, thinking I would enjoy a long night of a sleep with a nice lie in.
How wrong was I!
You need a bit of a background information on this: I live in college accommodation, within the main building of the college. My windows look onto part of the college gardens which are really damn gorgeous. The only problem with living next to the gardens?
Gardeners.
It seems like gardening is one of those jobs in Oxford where career advancement can be really quite good, and so the gardeners are keen. Very keen.
Last Sunday the gardens were open to the public and so, the gardeners actually came in on the Saturday. To mow the lawn. On a really loud lawn mower. For an hour. This pissed me off slightly as I was nursing a bit of a headache/hangover, and so I made a complaint.
Obviously it got nowhere.
And guess what the gardeners decided would be a good thing to do this morning?
MOW THE LAWN WHICH WAS ALREADY DONE FOUR DAYS AGO.
At 8.20 in the morning.
Yep, they're that keen.
And I spent my morning walking around my flat muttering under my breath, and sometimes screaming things such as "No respect for us, no respect for our home dammit!" and "Fucking gardeners!" and "Fuck!" and "Fuck fuck fuck!".
(at least the bad mood's gone now...)
...I wonder if I really want to be Italian.
Can you believe that 47% of my fellow Italians were stupid enough to elect a Prime Minister who is described by the Guardian as follows:
* * *
Fourteen years on, Berlusconi is again poised to return to power. Whatever else, he is not the joke figure he is sometimes made out to be. In fact, the outrageous statements that have earned him a reputation for buffoonery - at the last election, he likened himself to Jesus Christ - are often finely calculated, attention-grabbing devices.
...
He has been in trouble with the law continuously since the early 1990s, when Italian magistrates began probing the network of links that held together the country's corrupt postwar economic and political system.
He has been found guilty on several occasions, but his convictions have always been either overturned on appeal or timed out by statutes of limitation. He remains the subject of two trials in which a co-defendant is David Mills, husband of the British politician Tessa Jowell.
Some of the charges he faced in those cases have lapsed because of a law introduced by his own second and third governments, between 2001 and 2006. It was not the only legislation passed during that period that helped further his personal or business interests.
* * *
Can people really be so stupid? Can they? And, not only did they elect him, they voted for Bossi and the Lega Nord to have twice as many seats in Parliament as they had before. The uber-racist, misogynistic, semi-fascist Lega Nord; the ones who want to kick out all immigrants from Northern towns, who think people in the South are 'lazy'. It's fucking ridiculous and it makes me ANGRY, so angry.
I have few connections left with Italy. At the end of the day, I haven't lived there for over ten years, thirteen in fact, and I've only visited sporadically. Italian isn't even the language I speak on a daily basis anymore, and it's got to the point where saying "I'm Italian" feels a bit weird because, really, I don't belong anywhere specifically. But this makes me feel embarrassed to be Italian; the fact that people in my country elected a man who ridiculed us in front of the world, a man who thought it would be funny to joke about German politicians being SS officials in the European Parliament.
And you know what the first he's going to do is? He's going to let Alitalia go bankrupt, so his children can buy it off and have the Berlusconi family airline. And next thing we know... Ops! Another law that only makes him and a couple of other rich wankers happy! And then he's going to, you know, tell the Queen she should get laid more often! Ah! Funny man!
This is so sad it almost makes me want to cry.
(word count: 22,000. I have around 4,000 words left to write and then I'll be done! Yay. Editing sucks though.)
Over 20,000 words of actual thesis. Another 5,000 words of thesis and 3-4,000 words of methodology, and I'm done. Done! Well, apart from the fact that I still haven't received my supervisor's comments to the first three chapters, which I'll need to go through, and I'm fairly sure the last two chapters will need quite a bit of work... But still.
Less than 10,000 words and I'll be all done! And half of those are going to be easy-peasy.
So then I can send it off to my dear proofreaders, and hope for the best (even though I will remind them that I do not plan on getting anything more than a pass mark, and so they should be gentle!).
Thesis fatigue is settling in. Badly. Yesterday was lazy and procrastination-full, even though in a couple of hours of work I managed to finish another chapter. Today I need to finish the last chapter and go through everything. Tomorrow will be the conclusion.
How do you keep yourself motivated with this kind of stuff? Really? I'm so tired and bored of it already, and I don't hand in until the end of next week!
Damn, I need a cigarette.
Word count: 17,000
Actual word count of stuff written in coherent sentences: 12,000
Yesterday was a bit of a stressful day, to say the least. One good thing and one bad thing happened.
The good thing is that I now am a published author. Yep, Oxfam has finally published the report I wrote for them in the fall. I don't think they've started distributing it yet as I wasn't able to find it anywhere via Google, but when they do I shall post the link here out of excitement. And my name is even on the second page! Yes, in tiny print, but nonetheless... I just feel guilty now for not being involved in the redrafting process so much, but well. The last six months have been a folly of bad decisions anyway.
The bad thing is that I got an email back from my supervisor, and she is going on holiday from the end of the week until two days before my thesis is due... Now, it's entirely my fault for not keeping in contact better and, well... for not writing this damn thing sooner. But still, I had a bit of a panic there. And then I spoke with my lovely F, who reassured me, and decided it was OK. I've found a couple of people to read through the draft I'll have next week (with some corrections from my supervisor, who is going to read and comment on everything I send her before the end of the week), and it'll be fine.
Finally, that "this is only a master's thesis" has hit home. It is, that's all it is, and I have all the capacity in the world to do this and do well enough to pass. I am confident that I know what I'm talking about, and my fieldwork data is now turning out to be much better than what I thought it would. And being halfway through, my bibliography is already six pages long, which makes me sound like a complete smartass. Ah ah.
Now I could talk about certain people sometimes really really really piss me off, but I reckon it's not worth the effort. Back to work.
The 'actually written' thesis now stands at 9,653 words, i.e. the introduction and two chapters. The total thesis, which includes lots of random quotes and outlines, stands at exactly 14,061 words, which I guess it's pretty good going considering five days ago I had half that...
The writing is now, all of a sudden, going super quickly - so much so that I basically wrote out a whole chapter today. I guess all of that reading I did (which was a way of procrastinating at the time!) is paying off, as I'm finding that I can put things together fairly fast. I guess I can also thank the person who transcribed my interviews (paid for by the organisation I worked with!) and all of the prep work my supervisor suggested I did last term, as I'm basically just putting a puzzle together.
And almost enjoying it, apart from the fact that my brain is about to explode.
See, I'm going to turn into a boring person now, until this is done and dusted. Which, namely, is not going to be in a very long time. (Yay! Says my head.)
Now I have to wait for my supervisor to reply to my email. Let's see if she's going to kick my ass... Sigh.
At least I'm starting to think that I might not be the best academic writer, but I know how to tell a story. And that's all I want to do.
I've got around 7,000 words, which is really just the introduction and bits and pieces here and there, with one section of a random chapter almost done. Overall, not bad, considering I really only got my ass in gear... Well, this morning.
So why have I written almost 4,000 words today? Why is my ass in gear? I dunno, maybe because in exactly three weeks' time, I've realised, I shall be getting extremely pissed as this thing is going to be handed in and finally bloody DONE. I'm going to start planning cocktails now, seriously.
Another factor was spending three hours lying in bed last night unable to sleep because in my head I was screaming 'fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck'. So I'm actually going on probably about four or five hours' sleep right now, and am feeling incredibly lively and awake. Maybe because I finally got my ass in gear? Ah! Or it could be because of the flu pills I'm taking which are full of caffeine...
Or it could also be because it looks like spring here! After having woken up to fog, I was delighted to find out this afternoon that I could walk around outside without a jumper, or a scarf! And all of the trees have flowered, finally, two months after the daffodils! Spring! And light until late (summertime, I adore thee)!
Hyper, me?
No way.
:)
