2012: First-Quarter in Retrospect



I know I think. Does this cow or that tree knows it? ~http://philosophy-of-doctors.blogspot.com/2009/10/quoting-my-own-quotes.html 

Time flew so past and now it's April. You don't think you've done anything significant so far. But you've learnt a few significant things.

1. Doing a PHD is like trying to balance on a tight rope, with no interested audience. A genius somewhere said this. You totally agree!

2. Your level of tolerance for humour has significantly decreased; at times you find yourself severely suffering from humour-deficiency. PHD-induced, is all you can say.

3. When you hit rock-bottom (PHD-induced), it is much better to talk it out with someone who is undergoing or has gone through the same ordeal. Only fellow travelers on the PHD trail would understand what you're talking about. Those not on the trail would have no inkling of what you're talking about and they probably don't care anyway.

4. It's good to keep abreast with what's happening to the people that you care about so that you don't think the world revolves solely around your thesis. 

5. Cooking is therapeutic for #1, 2, 3. At least you can get it right. Plus, you can reap what you have sown immediately.

6. Do whatever that keeps you sane (and if possible, generate some kinda income at the same time). At least this liberates you from the mundane, laborious conventions of thesis writing and thinking.

7. If #2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 do not work, remember Engels' dialectics: the relation you have with your thesis is an active, dialectical tension that represents the "complex, changing, contingent, contradictory and coevolutionary of the world itself". There can be no final resolution until you sit for VIVA VOCE. In the mean time, suffer, suffer, suffer. And go back to #1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. 


*Speaking in second-person is also PHD-induced. 

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