Holland, 2-3 May 2008

buried in an offline computer

I thought I had all the time in the world to present my tiny master thesis by the beginning of June. This was until Friday. Up to now I'm 8 good pages ahead, but still nowhere near on schedule. Got to get used to rejecting evening meetings, movies and long dinners: the circadian rhythms are so much stronger here in Italy that it's impossible to work around the clock. It used to be so easy in May.

I'm still having some trouble creating connections between work and study - now, finally, they're both in the same area, but I still haven't got a clue how a good theory is supposed to be practical. I can go on for hours on discourse analysis and other such nonsense, but it doesn't seem to matter much. Theories, even if directly about my job, seem to be something I should know about, but only as a background to everything else. It's like the first-year general exams that one has to pass in order to be properly initiated, though it doesn't have any connection to the following studies and no-one will ever know if you remember anything or not.