post draft blues

…or is it just a drop in adrenaline as some might attribute it to? ok, i handed in my draft yesterday with great trepidation and a urgency not because ‘they’ (my supervisors) were demanding it but i was really pushing it out to them. besides being one to work best to a hard deadline, i needed to give it to them ASAP because i am going away in a few weeks’ time to malaysia. thus i wanted to make sure that they have at least a couple of weeks to read through my draft so that i have corrections to take away with me.

and now i am feeling all down and sad; unsure of why and what it is that is dragging me down.

so i dialed up itunes, cranked up the volume to the max and set it on shuffle while i clean, sort, file, organize, tidy up my office. i will have to face up to starting on the appendix soon.

the thing is that i guess i would have liked to have a few more days up my sleeve before handing up the draft; to clean it up, to polish it a bit before giving it away. it’s just pride and ego at the end of the day isn’t it? you spend years at this work; you live it, breathe it and you let it consume you and you just feel that you might not be doing it the justice it deserves.

ah well, let’s hope it passes soon.

a quiet milestone

i finally handed in my first draft of the thesis. it has taken me about 6 months to write 245 pages and just over 90 000 words. of course this will need to be trimmed. there were moments of inspired writing (if i dare say so myself) but there are also chunks of highly uninspired dribble. of course i told myself that i would polish the latter before subjecting my supervisors to it but due to time constraints, i just cannot do it, much to the bruising of my pride.

so i turned it in; all 245 pages of it, spiral bound to make my supervisors’ task a bit easier (and to make up for the inadequacies of my writing). it went in at 2.30pm today.

i had looked forward to having this tome lifted off my shoulders for i kept reminding myself that in fact the first complete draft is the most difficult stage towards submission. but yet i don’t feel elated. what an anti-climax.

so it is onward to the next task at hand – preparing the appendix.

feeling crappy

I had not been spending much time with my PhD writing for the past few days because I had been attending and presenting at a symposium at the university. of course I had every intention of doing my writing in the evening but for two days in a row, my day was unexpectedly truncated by the advent of a migraine. i felt fine in the morning but the headache just crept in and developed over the day and by about 4pm I was ready to surrender into a dark room and dosed up with strong painkillers.

Today is the first day I feel completely fine (fingers’ crossed). so I thought I should be getting back into my writing routine but no matter how hard I have tried, I just couldn’t seem to be able to focus all day. so I thought I might move out of my oppressive view-less office and plonk my laptop on a sitting area just outside my office. so here I am sitting here by the couch with my jug of warm chrysanthemum tea and with the view of city to my right.

but still i feel like crap. i feel like i have so much to do and that i am starting to drown. when this happened in the past, I instinctively fought against it, struggling to keep my head above water but today, I find myself not really caring as much, it is as if I am slowly giving up the struggle and considering just letting go and and submerging into the murky waters.

the singularity of writing

Recently I have begun to feel bad for constantly writing about my PhD journey on this blog. It would be ok if there are interesting stories associated with it but for most of the time, nothing much that happens, except (hopefully) for the gradual titration of writing. The process is extremely internal and singular, akin to a marathon whereby the competitor is yourself. It is an arduos and self-absorbed journey that takes its toll quietly and surreptitiously as each day drips by. I can’t really talk about it with anyone because no one else quite understands it. I am the expert of the work and it is up to me to lay it out, filling the pages.

I guess it is not all that bad. While the writing can be slow some days, I am actually making some interesting realisations along the way; thinking that has eluded me so far but somehow, with a different mindset and perhaps some intellectual maturity/confidence, I am able to be more incisive about what it is that I am doing, its contributions, the flaws (or what I might do differently if I were to do this again) and what are some ways forwards with this work.

Meanwhile I distract myself by spending some time looking for work and talking to a few people who are much more connected with potential ‘employers’. Here is pure escapism as I dream of working in a land far far away from Australia.

mental day off

Today I took a day off from writing. I did go in to the office but only briefly to pick up the latest file I was working on but I decided to take a break from actual writing. It doesn’t mean that I have stopped thinking about what to write. I really need a break. So apart from having to carry out the perfunctory housechores on Saturday, I took some time out to prepare a ’slow’ meal for dinner. It is a stew that needed my attention and a fair bit of preparation. I also made some pesto sauce for the week, did a fair bit of laundry and went out o get some personal necessities.

Interspersed with that, I caught up with some movies, music and finished reading a book about love: Conditions of Love: the philosophy of intimacy by John Armstrong. I must say that I am no wiser upon finishing it but perhaps am a bit more aware of the complexity of romantic love. It is not a guide book about how to love or sustain a relationship. It doesn’t offer any advice. It is simply a rumination about love: the various meanings (which are often contradictory), approach, characteristics, etc. The author draws from various western philosophers (including the bible, and also a lot from various writers including Tolstoy, Goethe, Dante, Schiller, and even the more contemporary such as Woody Allen. I guess it really depends on one’s expectations and what one hopes to get out of it. While it is an easy read, (for John Armstrong writes very well), I am left at the end thinking “and then?”

Ah well, at least I did learn something useful for my PhD, and that is how to write clearly and more directly.

queen’s birthday is good for writing

The Queen’s Birthday, a good excuse for a public holiday but as I indicated in my last post, it has not really affected my schedule but yet it has. Although I wanted to treat it just like any other weekday, I did start work a bit later. Psychologically, knowing that the rest of the city (and country) is on holiday gave me a renewed impetus to work, and work I did. Except for the lunch break, I did work (mostly steadily) through the day and managed to make some progress in my writing.

Maybe its because that the building is empty (save some other isolated PhD students), I felt less distracted. I couldn’t make the excuse of running upstairs to the department office to ‘get some stationery’ or to drop by into the office of some of my colleagues or peers. Even my (recent) favourite coffee-stand is closed. Instead, I read a little and powered on with my writing. Ah, if only everyday is like today. The trick I think is that I felt relaxed and not pressured to get things done. How can I find such opportunities again?

And another thing that is starting to bug me is how to answer friends’ well-meaning queries about how my writing is going. What can I say beyond, “its going along…slowly”, or “fine,” and on some days, “its not going so well”. These curt but vague answers are all I can think of and muster. In some ways, it actually reflects the uncertainties that I face when I try and gauge my own progress. I can’t do much better than those short quips if I were to ask myself that question. How does PhD candidate know how well he/she is progressing when writing the thesis/dissertation? Some ‘how to write a PhD thesis’ books suggest that we give ourselves a target number of pages. It doesn’t feel quite right yet for me but perhaps that is how I have to do it.

A Tale of One Thesis

I was reflecting on this blog while walking into the city tonight to meet my friends for dinner and I suddenly chuckled when I remembered that this blog was to chronicle my adventures in the UK, Europe and now life back in Australia. While tales of my wanderings have kinda fitted in with the blog, the entries since I came back had more of the ‘doldrums of PhD’. Has life stopped becoming an adventure after one’s overseas trip is finished? Was it an adventure because I was not in the country I ‘normally’ live in and now that I am back, so too the adventure? Ah…the predictable tangent of a PhD-soaked brain-never fail with the questions and analysis.

But it is a stretch if I were to chronicle my daily routine as an adventure. However if I can try and frame it in a more interesting and creative way, say perhaps sketching my writing up process more like a ’struggle of life and death with an enemy’ or even through the genre of a detective story, whereby the protaganist is trying to solve the mystery of the PhD despite great obstacles, a tale that is filled with unexpected twists and turns. Perhaps that might even make the actual gruelling (and thankless) process more engaging.

Ah, the things we (PhD students) do just to waste more time

mental focus

The mind is incredibly powerful in helping shape how we perceive our world and our relationship with others within this world. Perhaps that is why taming it can be so difficult and according to some authors, requires a lot of mental training and buffeting.

Right now, I am struggling with the mind, trying very hard to keep it reined in to do what I need it to do, and that is to focus and write. But my efforts have not been very successful so far. There are moments of clarity and focus but otherwise it appears lazy and wandering. It almost seems that I need to give myself a really good and stern talking to; to scold it, scare it or coax it into behaving properly. Like the current Melbourne weather for the past few days, my mental state feels foggy.

My resolve at this moment is to work out at least some of the contributing factors that I may be able to control, like the amount of sleep I get, the exercise I should be getting and my diet. The rest will be more difficult.

distracted

I have been distracted and very tired for the past few days because of my moving to the new place. Its been a one-month long move already but so far, Saturday (yesterday) was the killer. One of the last things I had to do was to clean the place I vacated. It was an 8-hour long of grueling non-stop cleaning. No food/snack break; not even a drink of water. By the end of the task, my arms were hurting and my wrist was in a lot of pain. The skin of my hands were so wrinkled that it hurts. Of course my back was killing me too. By the time I finished, I was not only tired but extremely grumpy. So it wasn’t surprised that I slept really soundly last night.

Tomorrow I will have to wait for someone to come and steamclean the carpet. He can’t turn up til 9am and he will take about 2 hours to complete the job. So it looks like there will be further distraction to my writing schedule. Then I have to rush back to Uni to give a lecture. On Tuesday I will be finally dropping off the keys of the old place to the agent. Hopefully all our efforts will not have been in vain and that we get our bond back.

However what this means is that I have been quite distracted from my thesis writing. I feel quite guilty really despite the good excuse. What it does is make me anxious, stressed, and this often manifests as impatience and being slightly short fused with myself and others around me. My tolerance level dips dramatically.

A large component of doing a PhD is about living with and managing guilt. Even taking a break to say, go watch a movie, I find it hard to switch the mind off. While watching the movie, my mind will be whirring away at the background, trying to figure something out or feeling guilty for not working. This of course ruins the movie experience. And if I decide not to go to the movies, I often end up not being productive either. So, once again I feel bad. I guess I am not the easiest to be around when I am feeling this way.

153 days

As of today, there are 153 days left to finish and hand in my PhD thesis. The revised date for my completion was adjusted to 19th of October 2008. This date also marks the moment when my scholarship officially runs out: no more money to live on.

Judging from the horror stories I have heard from others and the caution that has been thrown my way, this number represents a bleak state. I can choose to surrender and accept that it will be impossible for me to do it by that date or I can fight my darnedest to cross that line on time. If I choose the latter, then I will have to do something to change the way I have been working so far.

I am scared, worried and yet determined at the same time. I have not even completed a single chapter (out of the planned 9) and have only thrown down 10 000 words to date. I better get moving.