Return from the Dead

A year has past since my last post.

I feel as though I am resurrecting the dead in returning to this blog. It slipped from my consciousness when life began to run a little out of my control.

The reason for my absence was a restructuring of my academic life. I needed to break from routines and patterns of behaviour that were becoming non conducive to a healthy mental state. I came within a breath of giving it up altogether!

I broke my leg in January and this forced me to take a literal break from everything else. It was oddly enough a restorative time in my life.

And now I find myself facing a huge career building moment and I am lost for words and once again facing my own little wall of tiny writer's blocks! So I thought I would just pop in here and say - I AM SHITTING MYSELF!

That could be a self portrait of me just now as I keep opening books trying to find the inspiration to start the writing process. (Well it could be except I am blond and blue eyed and slightly less gormless looking!)

I better get on with it - I fly next week!

in other news ... well let's face it if I sat here and waffled on for pages and pages about all the things that have happened in the last 12 months since my last entry, that would just be me procrastinating wouldn't it? ... and I can't possibly allow myself to spend any more time doing that!

But - before I get right down to it,  let me just have a browse through some other academic blogs and see if I am the only one who finds the actual getting in with it this difficult!

In Hiding!

I am truly living up to my name and avoiding the inevitable - which is a reply to an email from my supervisor asking me what I have been up to and how I am progressing.

The problem is I cannot quite find the appropriate language to convey the sentiment that I have basically done fuck all. I am not sure she will be entirely sympathetic, even though I have Charlie Brooker on the defence team - in fact I am thinking of making him lead council for the case of Supervisor versus the Procrastinating Pimpernel!

Now please don't misunderstand me, like Mr Brooker  I spend hours of the day 'researching' typing reading etc., etc., blah, blah, blah, - the problem is not with input but output! The distractions on offer are innumerable and delicious! Between my addiction to Blip , other bloggers and facebook, there are the delights of browsing the internet for resources. I have thousands of them at my fingertips - but once found they are bookmarked and promptly forgotten!

Tomorrow's resolution - to fucking well get on with it! And then perhaps, maybe, eventually I shall pluck up the courage to reply to my supervisor and .... well tell her the truth tell her that things are once more in motion and just hope that my nose doesn't grow!

Just in case you were wondering - I am not old, male and grey haired - neither am clad in a bikini and a party hat, nor a dinosaur! ;)

VW by Roger Fry

Alert for Woolf Scholars - Woolf Seminar, a new website which generously shares the insights of Dr Kay. Well worth a browse when one is otherwise free from internet distractions like Frontierville! I particularly liked the section which listed her favourite Woolf quotes. Plenty there to see and enjoy for any of you who can't resist a Bloomsbury adventure when one presents itself.

Prometheus and the Ph.D Student; An elaborate metaphor in 3 parts.

So I am sat at my desk. Feeling like the lead female in some Hitchcock thriller ...

why?

Yesterday I reorganised my desk so it feels a little unfamiliar. I thought a change would stimulate the grey matter - it just feels slightly weird! I am sitting with my back to the door - something I don't ever do not even in restaurants (I feel that in a past life I was clearly connected in someway to the mafia). I am not sure I like it.

I moved as I have a corner desk and I was positioned in the corner and this meant that the table legs and joining struts were digging into my feet and my thighs respectively and making sitting for prolonged periods pretty uncomfortable! Now I am sat at a straight piece of the desk and it is decidedly easier on the legs - but the whole  'back to the door' thing is creeping me out ... I feel like a character in my own horror film. It doesn't help that is pretty grey outside and dark enough to warrant a desk light, which casts a wandering shadowy glow over the desk. It is also deathly still, as I am alone in the house (for once!)  - all I can say is it's a good job I have on skanky underwear or I would be sure to be the first victim!!! Because everyone knows the first victim in any horror b-movie is always the pretty girl in the good undies! Any minute now someone is going to say - 'Don't look behind you!' Poor Janet Leigh!

Of course this entry is sheer procrastination - as my draft is sitting, covered in red ink marks, awaiting me to commit my edits to type! 
And what am I doing? 

Yes that's right I am here - talking to myself!

Of course, this blog provides me with a great opportunity to get my mind ticking over the unsurmountable perfectly conquerable problems that lay ahead of me today. To sort out the creative flow, and prepare myself for the arduous task of editing!

Taking the metaphor a little further ...

Perhaps it is my thesis that is the villain of this particular scenario ... ever lurking, waiting to pounce on me the minute my guard is lowered. Ready to consume me from the soul outwards... devouring my hot fevered mind, until I am nothing but a babbling shell, stuck repeating the phrase 'Rebecca West WAS a Vorticist' ... until my tongue swells and rots out of my mouth - at which point I will be left with blank vacant hollowed out eyes, silently mouthing the same phrase, in a grotesque manner ... suffering the same fate as Prometheus's liver!

OK so that may seem like the most unworkable metaphor ever - A Hitchcockian Heroine cast as an extra in the Homeric Odyssey. But bear with me ...  If we think of this metaphor in terms of me as Prometheus and my supervisor as the Eagle and my thesis as the liver, then this metaphor works surprisingly well. I present up my liver to the Eagle, she pecks at it until it resembles coarse pate (Ardennes of course) and I then crawl away to slowly regenerate it only for the cycle to be repeated ad infinitum...

Anyone know what happened to poor Prometheus - did he ever find any peace?

On a lighter note I must get back to regenerating my theoretical live - aka my thesis!

'Borrowed' from: 'Welcome to the Miserable World of Prometheus'