Hello all. Not much to say this time around...I've been holed up in my room for the last few days, sweating my papers as the semester rapidly comes to an end. After this, I'll have no more classes, no structure of any kind all summer, just me and the looming dissertation deadline, playing a game of academic chicken. Gulp.
Actually, it shouldn't be that bad...after this semester's deeply unstaisfying experience, I am looking forward to directing my own work and reading, being able to formulate ideas, questions and connections without the imposition of that god-awful shock collar, the 3,000 word limit. I have never felt so stymied by a simple rule as I do by that one, which was especially disappointing this semester as I discovered a topic that really interested me and was prevented at every turn from adequately exploring all its nuances and implications. Sigh. Maybe I'll be able to treat it more fully in a real paper some day.
Still, frustrating limits aside, I'm feeling better about things than I was a week ago. Perhaps it's the rather ugly result of having nerdily completed all of my work extremely early, and a certain schadenfreude as I watch my classmates lose their minds in these last few days, but I seem to be rather calm. Alternatively, perhaps I've just given up. Yet another explanation, hidden behind door number three, might be that spring seems to have (knock wood) definitively sprung here in Caledonia. There are daffodils and tulips blooming everywhere, forsythia blossoming, rhododendrons starting to bud...overall, spring in Scotland looks very much like spring in Portland, which reminds me constantly of how much I'm looking forward to returning to Stumptown, in and for a few days.
So that's where I am...a little brain- and spirit-tired after the semester's last big push, a little disheartened yet again at how unfulfilling this program has turned out to be, a little homesick, a little confused. But only a little.
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