Decompressing
Wednesday night there was a party for masters students and faculty at one of the professors' house, and then Thursday morning there was a post mortem about the degree as a whole with a couple of the faculty. Hanging out with everyone and reflecting on the whole process means it hit me yesterday a) that I'm done! and b) how great the last year has been and how much I got out of it. And how fond I am of many of my very bright, very interesting, very international cohort, and that I hope we stay in touch. A lot of them have found jobs in London, so I think there might be regular dinners here every few months. I'm decompressing and indulging in some retail therapy (books that aren't about scheduling theory! yay!) until I head back to Bristol tomorrow.

I think the things that kept me marginally sane in the last few days of dissertation-writing were Bach Rescue Remedy and phone calls and emails to/from friends. Particularly talking to John and Grash. Somehow whenever one of them was being an insecure overachiever, it made me realise that my similar thinking patterns were ridiculous. The best instance of this was a voice mail from John, sent Aug 31 at 12:36 AM, first listened to Tuesday morning when I awoke, transcribed before it got deleted from my phone:

Dirrty. Oz. Just called to bitch. But you're off, so you're either sleeping or you have isolated yourself from distractions, both of which would be wise activities. Uh, anyway. Having a crisis of confidence: too much to write, too little time. Panic. Add to the fact that I think I screwed up one of my explanations which is never good and anyway...
So anyway, I was just calling for a pre-bedtime whinge, but anyway, hope that you're either sleeping or being productive. I am going to try to get a little sleep now, will be at BLPES from hopefully 9:30 or 10 tomorrow until they close the door on me. Uh, so I'll probably give you a buzz at some point during the day tomorrow to compare notes and you know kind of commiserate and that sort of thing.
So anyway, hope things are going well and you have results and a beautiful, intelligent, witty write-up. And I will continue to be craptastic and go from there.
So anyway, take it easy, talk to you later, bye.

John is very un-craptastic, so that made me laugh and diminished anxiety.
- posted by Christina @ 3:14 pm