Hotel Oxford

Yeah, I guess I should be the first to admit that I have been blogging a lot lately sheerly as an outlet for restless frustration (I am both autistic and hyper). Well, wait, let me explain and try to avoid just going of on some gibberish, technical blog. I am in a complete state of suspension, stuck waiting for two very important exam results which don't come back until next week, not to mention a series of approvals for my dissertation. I can't work on what I want to work on, and it starts to drive you a bit crazy, like sitting in a waiting room endlessly.

I have now been done with the second thesis draft since Monday and am still waiting, and I have been waiting on exam results since first week of March. Yeah, how can it take months to get exam results back to students? The answer as to why it takes them so long when we know everything has been graded since about seven weeks ago is too dark to iterate—either they take incompetence to an all new low or they are simply sadists, or both. I tend to lean to the sadists myself, but I'm going to resist the strong urge to share specific instances of such sadism at work. So, anyway, yeah, it is hard to concentrate in these sort of waiting-room weeks. The worst is the final day and hours before you get your exam results. You have to go to your convener's office and wait outside in a que, and, of course, you can hear everything through the door, so you know what everyone before you is getting, and then people start coming out of the office crying (because bombing the papers pretty much means that is it; you'll never get the career position you want because you won't get the D.Phil—I know the tragic dimensions are lost on all those who don't relish the chance to live in penury and humiliation for five years and then compete in a tight job market ).

I might do well though since last term I tried taking fish capsules. It is supposed to increase your IQ, and I hoped it would therefore improve my performance (other things tried have been wishing wells, black magic, white magic, various incantations, bribery, sleeping with professors, death threats—kidding).

So why am I sharing this? No idea. Anyway, yep, I've got nothing. I don't even think all this Oxford related stuff matters too terribly much. Seriously, so you are going to write this extremely boring book on the development of the reading public in seventeenth-century England, or Jane Austen's punctuation, or the history of the natural language movement, or, in my case, protein molecules etc. and it will sell about five copies and waste nine years of your life. But, hey, at least you have goals.

Let's see, what else is going on...we've had a lot of weather, yep. Um, I know, how about some interpretive art:

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And now for something really different: