Well, if you are around, I will be checking in so at least you have some company on the forums! Sometimes its better than nothing! I will be at home, was driven to find the means to get home for the holidays when I thought of facing what you are--a bleak several weeks in a bleak place that really is no home...so I really do feel for what you are going to face. :-(

Its not much, but if you do hang out on the forums, I will be sure to check here a few times a day during the holidays and see whats going on!

======= Date Modified 06 Dec 2008 16:12:03 =======

Sometimes it strikes me that the PhD is not isolated, its just isolated in all the wrong ways--as I can point out plenty of areas of life where I could do without all the dealings with other people--and not enough of the sort of isolation that is quiet, contemplative, introspective battery charging me time...so I dream of a time post PhD when:

1. I will not have to share a bathroom with unrelated adults.

2. I will not have to share a kitchen with unrelated adults.
( and not with unrelated adults who believe in a rubbish fairy, now a washing up liquid fairy, and a cleaning fairy)
3. My office space will be mine....not just borrowed, small, or squashed or unpleasantly public.
4. Cars will not drive on the pavement instead of the street, making the already crowded pavements even more hazardous.
5. My "home" will be larger than an 8 x 8 room with a bed the size of a yoga mat.
6. I will not be ejected from my "home" at odd hours and in bad weather because other Tower inhabitants decide to demonstrate at 3 a.m. that they do not know how to cook and must set their kitchens on fire as absolute proof of this incompetency.

It strikes me that there are very few times in the day when I am not in hearing or sight of sooo many people. Even at "home", there are the sounds of the other Bleak Towers inhabitants, sometimes sounds you do not wish to hear...

The only time that there is blissful peace and quiet is if I work after hours at the university...something I seem to do more and more!

Thanks everyone for the encouragement and sympathy. I may see about getting my eyes checked, these headaches are killer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAM1g0oX4OE&NR=1

Ok,in my random net surfing procrastination ( I mean, waiting for inspiration on a stuck point) I came across this absolutely interesting rendition of the Eagles Hotel California--made by two people who have never met, assembing files of their individual singing and playing into a video. Its amazing, not the least of which is one person doing 6 part harmony,and utterly stupendous guitar playing!!!!! (up)

grits

poke

brats

Academia is weird!!!!! I understand about perhaps wanting to clarify status if you were a fulltime staff member and then started your degree, versus doing the degree with some teaching tacked in to it. I do some tutorials, but I don't think of myself as a member of staff, as much as I think of myself as a student doing some tutorials...a student with some staff functions thrown in. And of course I realise that the hiearchy and status and etc of each department of each uni is different and people have to respond to those environments...In my own head I suppose I have not internalised the identity of a student, in other words, while I will say that is what I do, in my own head I am still a lawyer who is temporarily a student...my sense of primary self reference still being in my profession and not in my studies, if that makes sense.

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I have gone on about this in other threads...but I dislike the whole thing of trying to dress up being a PhD student as something besides being a student---an example I can think of is someone with business cards that say PhD Researcher. To me, that sounds like someone who has attained the degree and has employment as a researcher. What is wrong with calling yourself a student--when that IS what you are? To me it sounds dishonest to call it something else, but that's just me. But what on earth is wrong with saying you are a student? I have no problems saying this to people! I am rather pleased with my transition from career to study--there is nothing shameful for me in being a student, nor do I feel it personally as some sort of dimunition of status, although there are people who do treat you as the low rung on the ladder as a student...but calling yourself something different doesn't change where you might be in some sort of imaginary pecking order.

So we are left with an education system where the libraries replace canteens, students no longer learn, they do something else, and they aren't called students anymore.....madness!

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