Winding down

I get resentful every December because all of my non university affiliated friends are celebrating the end of their year. I would get even more resentful right about this time every year as well, because this is when my year is reaching its frantic crescendo and all anyone else seems able to think about is barbecues, except the pollen is so bad that I can't bring myself to care about anything. And I'm not entirely sure that anyone else can either. The offices are empty, administrators aren't answering their phones, my supervisors only exist in theory and everyone I run into on campus looks as though they're either coming off of or about to embark on a multi-day opiate bender. It is a weird time of year, made weirder still by the three-week-long Easter break that is proving nearly impossible to come back from. I went to Reading, but my brain appears to have hitchhiked to the moon, and it is refusing to either return or to focus on anything besides long distance hikes that I haven't gotten to take, varieties of cider I haven't gotten to drink, and inane conversations that I haven't gotten to engage in.

If I'm this much of a useless blobfish, I'm kinda worried about what kind of shape my students are going to be in. Theoretically, they'll be giving me final projects to mark soon, except the prompts for the projects haven't been given out, and the course convenors aren't answering my messages. My professors in undergrad used to vanish to a parallel dimension around this time of year too, so I suppose it might be a universal thing.

This spring, as it happens, marks the halfway point of the enrolment phase of the PhD. I celebrated by trying to convince Dave to let me quit and become a ditch digger. He said no. So I keep promising myself that if I can get through the end of term and PPD training in June and Annual Review without cracking and setting something on fire, I'm going to spend all of July sitting in the summer house at the bottom of Dave's garden, smoking hookah like Carroll's caterpillar and finishing the novel I'm about halfway through drafting, so that Henry will have something to tell me to go redo in the fall.