Inchoate Ramblings

Welcome to the first of an irregular sequence of posts where I have decided to keep you updated with the last stages of my PhD, as we play the fun and exciting game of whether I will have a breakdown before or after I submit this bastard of a thesis. Even though the most optimistic submission date is 7 months away, but I feel that now is a good time to start. So join me as I present my moral, spiritual and physical collapse for your entertainment!

Submitting a thesis is like being stuck in an event horizon of your own making, it looms larger and larger,and sucks more and more life out of you until you remain little more than a wizened shell, the human equivalent of a dried apricot. Indeed, so severe has it become that JL has stopped blogging entirely, and I have started rambling (incoherently, of course).

Why do I think I am having a breakdown? Well, because I am stressed. Not just a little stressed mind you, but massively and sustainedly stressed. I need money, so I try to do actual jobs as much as possible to generate the $, which of course leaves less time for the PhD itself. Infact I got paid yesterday and for the first time in 4 months actually used EFTPOS to buy something (it was toothpaste, incidentally). I try to balance a relationship with the demands of work that, if I let it, would take up all day every day. As it stands I spend most of my time thinking about it, looking off into middle distance thinking thoughts about Critical Realism and Norms as emergent causal phenomena. I can no longer go to sleep without before hand reaching a point of physical exhaustion so that my head won’t whirl away. I sleep like a dead man at the moment, albeit between about 2 and 7am. Adding insult to injury various departmental machinations have made me feel largely unvalued, which forces one to question why exactly this is all a good idea.

Last week I made a very good analogy between myself and a creme brulee. Whilst on the surface all is crisp and sharpe, underneath I am a seething mass of over cooked cream, and the least crack in my exterior leads to an upwhelling of viscous and unctuious self pity. I am, at any given time, merely a careless thought or comment away from dissolving into crying recrimination and regret. I can’t talk about jobs, because that leads to the questions, what jobs, where, when, why those not others. I can’t talk about countries because I don’t know where I will be, I sometimes start thinking about residency requirements and points, but then I realise that a PhD is worth less to the Australian government than if I did a 6 month hair dressing course, and I become very very very doubtful that this is the sort of country that I really should stay in.

So that is it, to date at least. It has taken me a while to getting around to blogging directly about this, mostly because it is hard to blog about that which you are trying stoically to ignore. Whilst I have no doubt, when I am honest, that I will get there, I do rather hope that the final stages are somewhat less turbulent that I am expecting.