…to the phd.

I submitted my thesis for examination today. But not before:

  1. getting a flat tire on the way to work yesterday
  2. my ibook’s hard disk dying, also yesterday, subsequent to which…
  3. While waiting for my new macbook pro to be formatted (WOO!), I completed the edits on a windows machine, which then…
  4. crashed, meaning that
  5. for some reason, the final version of my thesis doesn’t open on a mac
  6. So I had to borrow a windows machine to do final, final edits and printing

Throughout all of that I was ridiculously serene and faintly amused, which is not like me. I don’t know what’s happened to me really, especially considering I’ve just lost all my emails and word docs since last October, which is when I did my last proper backup (except for my thesis drafts, which I was paranoid about, thank god). I feel more than a little bit silly about being so lax about backing up data. But as for the phd thing, maybe all the external fuck-ups helped me to be less paranoid about my fear of complete failure. Anyway, it’s printed, bound, and officially under examination, 3 years to the day after I started. Which is not a product of my virtuosity so much as it is a product of my clenched-jaw pragmatism, because…

As of today, I’m a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation at QUT. More on that later, for now, just a weird surreal feeling. I can’t describe how light and strangely undirected I feel.

But I do have plans for the future, big ones. More after I stop floating.

PS if anyone has any ideas about how I might rescue the word document so that I can actually do the inevitable corrections on my Mac, please, please, let me know.