An Innocent Abroad: Wall

I'm sitting at my desk for the ninth semi-consecutive hour of the day looking at the two undergraduate dissertations that I need to ink up in time to talk to their authors tomorrow about all the comments made on the earlier drafts that they somehow neglected to incorporate.

Earlier today I was the only person in a professional developments session on networking that wasn't a first year or running the thing. They were all so hopeful. And neatly dressed. And they all knew what their thesises (thesii?) were on. And they wanted to talk about how intimidating it was composing emails to their supervisors. And afterwards I saw them all eating pretty lunches in the postgrad space while socialising.

And I hadn't brushed my hair because I couldn't find my hairbrush and I was wearing the same clothes I wore down on the train yesterday and I hadn't packed a lunch because there was no food in the house to pack and I'd had anti-inflammatories for breakfast because spending that long on the train always makes my back cranky and I avoided them all because I had to mark up those dissertations before I ran out of steam for the day. Which, as is probably obvious, doesn't seem to have happened.

I might be inordinately proud of the fact that I didn't strangle any of them. Heck, I didn't even snap at them.

And now I'm alternating between looking at the dissertations but not marking them up and looking at the draft I owe Henry but not revising it, and taking occasional breaks to think about the work I was supposed to have done for Rachel by now and wondering if she's noticed either the draft I sent her at the beginning of November or that there hasn't been anything from me since.

I may have also paused to arrange my coterie of sock owls into comforting configurations.

The little one in the middle is squeaking 'you can do it!' Or possibly, 'if you don't do it I will invade your dreams with a machete and make you wish you had!'

There's obviously only one thing to do in this situation...