Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

I am sitting at my desk surrounded by books: three of them are propped open. Ten others have sticky flags marking points I need to get to. Another twenty are making me feel guilty that I haven’t read them yet. I have about 40 relevant tabs open in Firefox right now (stuff from JSTOR, Google Scholar, Copac). Most of these will lead me to open other tabs, if only to search for stuff in the library. I already know that I need to consult materials from special collections and journal storage this week.

I also have NeoOffice documents open (current draft, bibliography, earlier draft, relevant notes). Hard copy versions of early drafts with marginal notes from my supervisor are in a plastic case in a desk drawer so that I can consult them as necessary.

Writing a thesis is the fine art of making something shiny from a chaos of material. If you don’t get a high from being slightly entirely overwhelmed by information and ideas, grad school will make you miserable. Even if you do, you sometimes just have to step back from it all and have a non-ironic cookie washed down with a few shots of whiskey.

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