Spring Break thus far has been an exciting exercise in “How long can Sasha work without accidentally trying to open up tumblr?” (best record: two hours; worst record: one sentence) and “How crazy will Sasha drive her family while she is home and working on her thesis?” (hint: a lot) and “How crazy will Sasha drive herself while she is home and working on her thesis?” (hint: ALSO A LOT) and “How much will Sasha hate everything she has written as soon as she finishes writing it?” (hint: REALLY REALLY A LOT) and lots of exciting other questions like that.
This all probably sounds really negative and like I’m whining again, but honestly I’ve almost been enjoying myself, in a very weird and probably masochistic way. There’s something very interesting about feeling as if you’re attached to a rope that’s slowly fraying. It’s sort of exciting. And it’s made for some very entertaining moments thus far over break.
[under the cut: Thesis stuff, a comic!!!! and the two things that made me laugh the hardest this week. Warning: this post contains profanity.]
So I have to say first of all that I don’t think my poor mother knew what she was getting into this break. My sister wrote a thesis last year, but she was doing a translation; it was stressful, and a ton of work (as we all got to experience, since every five minutes a question would come drifting out of the living room: “Hey, if a guy is falling into a pit of rocks, which word do you really think captures the connotations of that better, _____ or _____? I can use it in a sentence.”) but it was also a fairly constant rate of work. Writing a critical thesis, as we have excitingly discovered, involves a lot of sitting around and cursing at the screen and then doing more research and then writing and doing more research and then outlining and then outlining again and then writing and then scrapping that and outlining again, this time with bonus profanity.
And it has made me… slightly grumpy. As in, prone to snapping at people who are asking innocent questions.
And then, in less than a second…
THESIS HULK.
Thesis Hulk possesses a heaping dose of furious anger derived from Thesis Hulk’s own existential despair, and also has the ability to apologize for taking Thesis Hulk’s out on you while still taking Thesis Hulk’s anger out on you. Oh, yeah. Apologies for irrational behavior get exciting in my house.
On the other hand, I almost recommend that people do something like this, because it makes everything so much funnier. Like, okay, if I say that the other night my mom jokingly suggested, “Well, you’ve got 100 pages already, haven’t you? Couldn’t you just stop there?”, which was ALREADY HILARIOUS (much like Mordor, one does not simply stop writing a thesis) before Lovely Sister and I began elaborating the ways of doing that —
“So on page 100—“
“No no no, finish page 100, then stop on 101—“
“Yes, exactly, all of 101 is just — SO LONG, BITCHESSSSSSS.”
“SASHA OUT.”
“QUOTH THE RAVEN, NEVER-FUCKING-MORE.”
— it probably doesn’t sound nearly funny enough to make me convulse of laughter for approximately ten minutes, so intently that my mom and Lovely Sister were actually not sure whether I was laughing or crying, and yet that is exactly what I did.
(Look, okay, I have been aware for quite some time that not only is my thesis going to be longer than 100 pages but the most interesting stuff is going to be the stuff after the 100 page mark, and also if my thesis were only 100 pages I would have been done so much sooner, and also there is just something inherently hilarious about stopping in the middle of a sentence and filling the entire next page with a gif of me flipping the bird repeatedly with my elbows flying everywhere. Don’t judge me.)
And then I finished the actual content of my thesis — which, okay, yes, good for me, I have written 120 pages, some of which I absolutely detest and some of which I think is actually decent despite myself, and while I understand intellectually that this is actually kind of cool I am not sure that I truly viscerally comprehend the magnitude of my own achievement, and anyway I still have to write the intro and conclusion and then edit horribly — and I was informed that I needed to be celebrating.
Unfortunately, we’d finished up all our cookies the day before, and the main things dessert-wise that we had in the house were some chocolate truffles. And I kept waffling, you know, because I didn’t want to go leave the house to get ice cream, and I’m not always a huge Lindt person, and I didn’t really feel like having a cider or anything, and then I said, “Wait, I know what to do!” and promptly ran upstairs to grab the pack of thin ginger cookies sitting in my room.
Of course, when I came downstairs, my mom, my stepdad, and Lovely Sister all took one look and said, “SASHA WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT THAT IS NOT CELEBRATION FOOD.”
Which, okay, SCREW YOU GUYS GINGER THINS ARE ABSOLUTELY CELEBRATION FOOD AND I WILL STAND FAST BY THAT UNTIL THE DAY I DIE, but my arguments did not sway the rest of my ABSOLUTELY TASTELESS AND JOY-DENYING family, who continued to berate me about my choice of cookie until we were engaged in one of the highly enjoyable top-of-our-lungs not-really-an-arguments that we love so dearly.
Some highlights of the conversation:
Lovely Sister: “Look, ginger thins are great FOR AFTERNOON TEA, they’re not for celebrating! What are you going to celebrate, ‘OH LOOK, THE MAIL HAS COME, HOW EXCELLENT, LET ME HAVE A GINGER THIN!’”
Mom: “What next, you’re going to say that you want to celebrate with some applesauce?!?”
Me: “YOU KNOW WHAT, YES I WOULD, APPLESAUCE IS F*CKING GREAT.”
Me: “I hope you step on a lego.”
Lovely Sister: “THIS IS FOR YOUR OWN GOOD.”
Me: “I hope all your ice cream melts before you can eat it.”
Lovely Sister: “WHY ARE YOU CURSING ME, I AM GETTING YOU ICE CREAM.”
Basically, I’m right and they’re wrong, but I enjoyed the celebratory ice cream nonetheless.
Well, I think I’ve been procrastinating for long enough. Time for me to go eat more ice cream and work on figuring out how on earth I’m going to introduce this piece of ridiculousness I call my thesis. Until later, ducklings. SASHA OUT.
[Original tags on this post: academia is whackademia, my life: badly drawn in photoshop, spring break, the return of the badly drawn photoshop comic,thesis, thesis stuff]
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