The thesis hermit
On Sunday Jac cooked us a yummy breakfast of fried eggs, bacon and mushrooms fried in butter.
After breakfast she got ready to go out – she was off to Mandurah for a wedding party (long story short: a mate went to Japan 4 years ago to work and married a Japanese woman over there. This was their first time back in Perth and this was the wedding reception they never had with all the Perth family and friends). I stayed home and worked on my chapter. My family was getting together for a curry puff-making session, lunch and mahjong, but I really wantedneeded to work on the chapter. I’ve been starting to feel a little stressed out because time is moving so fast and I have so much work left to do before the thesis is completed. I’ve been very quiet about feeling stressed, but I think people are starting to see it on my face when they ask me how I am – and if it’s not stress they see, they definitely see tiredness, which isn’t good anyway. I feel like crap most of the time, and it doesn’t help when I’m at social dos (which, a lot of the time I don’t really want to be at) and people keep asking me about the PhD. I really don’t like talking about it (I might get into the specific reasons why some other time – maybe not).
And so on Sunday working at home to a soundtrack of Dixie Chicks and New Order I added about five pages to the chapter, which may seem like crap-all, but I really laboured over them. I’m not in an eloquent writing place at the moment – I haven’t been for months. If only I could write the thesis like I was just talking about it, without the need for particularly elegant use of language. If I could just throw in a few craps I reckon it would be so much easier. I was so exhausted when Jac got home in the evening. Five pages, that’s so pathetic. But then, when I was writing my Honours thesis I spent three days on a single paragraph, and somehow I still managed to hand the thesis in early.
Saturday night was my mum’s 60th birthday dinner. That post will be coming tomorrow. Thanks to a power failure this evening I lost about an hour and a half, and it’s now time to get ready for bed.