supacrush vs thesis

I finished another chapter last week, and got a new font! Electra. Drool drool, it's beautiful. Over the weekend I wrote drafts of my bibliography and table of contents in it. New font makes work fun!

Good lord there was a lot of whingeing in May! How dull - there'll be no more of that. Except to say that, why do people think it's a good idea to spell their song titles in sms abbreviations? Does it serve as a forewarning that anyone over the age of consent is likely to hate it and should keep a safe distance? Or are they just silly?

Hold on while I grab my walking stick...

After a few weeks' break earning my keep, I'm now partway through scratching out chapter 3.

The main piece of wisdom I can offer this week is: if you don't yet have Mylo, Destroy Rock & Roll, go out immediately and get it. A wise man has called this a contender for album of the year, and I agree.

aka, chapter 6 draft is done. I was anticipating being excited, but clubbing baby seals is about how it feels at the moment. I want a holiday! But I can't take a holiday, because I need to bash out the rest of my thesis before it sifts out of my brain and I am hopelessly trapped as an unemployable bum with a large c.v. gap! So I sit up til 5am, half dreaming and half forgetting how to speak English, and funnelling the results onto the page. Poor thesis. We used to have such high hopes.

... is looking good to be finished by Friday!

I got 900 words done on Monday, and 1,000 yesterday. Things are looking up. This time, for a change, a self-imposed deadline, widely publicised,* seems to have done the trick.

I'm starting to realise now that this state of being a PhD student is eventually going to end. That's a very weird feeling!


*A widely publicised self-imposed deadline, and maybe some bribery.

"It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article's niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems. Dixon had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse than most in its air of being convinced of its own usefulness and significance. "In considering this strangely neglected topic," it began. This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what? His thinking all this without having defiled and set fire to the typescript only made him appear to himself as more of a hypocrite and fool."

From Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim
(One of the best of all possible books.)

Hey, at least Dixon's paper included actual facts!

Just finished planning a new chapter. This is all feeling like such a slog atm. At least this chapter should be relatively straightforward to write. I thought planning it would be a pain since there's about four different papers I'm discussing, covering three or four different types of sentences, and sometimes appearing to offer two different types of solutions. But actually it so far seems quite ok. I won't hold my breath for it to stay ok once I start writing though.

How do other people get through this? Willpower? Brainpower? Booze? I could do with more of all three!

Just finished a first draft of Chapter 5 v2.0. At last.

Time for a drink.