Well, it’s official: I’ve begun writing my Thesis even though I haven’t finished my data-gathering yet, and probably will have to do another couple of months of it.

Yesterday I attended an excellent all-day University course on how to write the thing, and if anything, it was encouraging to meet other despairing, stressed, and panicking final-year PhDs. It alleviates the loneliness, you see.

The course was great: The University standards on Thesis presentation and submission, tips on writing and overcoming writer’s block, drawing from countless previous cases… It really demystified a lot of issues and made it sound actually plausible.

Why devote an entry to talk about this? Because during the years you devote to a PhD, the Thesis plagues your life, hopes and dreams, seeping slowly into the depths of your anyway deteriorating, ragged, enslaved psyche and gleefully destroying it day-by-day until you’re left nothing but a pitiful puppet, a human ghost so frail and fragile that every breath of existence seems like swallowing the very essence of Pain itself. Yeah, I think that pretty much explains it.

Finally, I admit that lately my entries are neither the usual article-level (because of all my work) nor probably interesting, but I find no reason to stretch this one. If you are or have been in the PhD world, you don’t want to hear about it; if you aren’t, you don’t need to. Believe me, you don’t.