L'chaim

I'm moving out in less than a week (good gracious, where did all the time go?) and I've still barely gotten my travel details and all that shaken out. Looks like my unfinished entries on my first leg through Europe won't be coming up anytime soon.

Have been somewhat depressed ever since two hours ago when one of my flatmates came into the kitchen and told me that she was moving out "early," on Monday. OK well not that early, we're supposed to clear out by Friday anyway, but it just really brought home the fact that I'm ending my master's year here in London and that life as I'd known it for the past eleven months is really and truly drawing to an end. Oh, and also the fact that I've not gotten any travel planning done whatsoever, apart from booking those hostels in Vienna and Budapest, and booking that bus from Buda to Wien. That really does make me a teeny bit nervous. And the fact that I won't be living next to the library anymore. Gosh, everything just seemed so..speeded up, after May. I can still remember May vividly, going off to the Continent on my own for the first time. Finshing my term papers and slogging over that critical survey and going through buckets of Haagen Dazs. Coming back...going to ROMANIA. Going to Copenhagen and Poland and sleeping in the Lech Walesa airport - an interesting experience but not one I'd really care to repeat again.

For someone who did their masters in lit, I'm notoriously bad at articulating my feelings. I do feel this storm of emotions at graduating, and at the same time it's just so anti-climactic. You'd expect more pomp and ceremony, and instead our poxy grad ceremony is in Feb next year so I probably won't go anyway. People seem more busy with their dissertations (it's mind boggling to think that about two thirds of them haven't finished yet), finding jobs and accommodation, flying back home, basically getting on with their life etc. I suppose that's what I should be doing, except I'm kind of lying around, eating Oreo ice cream, and 'drifting around without a purpose' so to speak. Ayn Rand would be appalled. Oh yeah, and writing long email replies to the wonderful people I met during previous travels. I'm jellyfishing, floating serenely through the chaotic currents of autumnal London. Carpe dieming, which as I told a friend recently, is the English grad's equivalent of the much-reviled 'yolo.'

Well, I'm having some sort of brunch with a friend tomorrow morning, and hopefully that'll be enough to give my complacent rump a good kick and make me feel better about stuff per se.

Eh, don't really know what else to say. I enjoyed my year here, very much so.Wouldn't exchange this experience for anything in the world...well, a billion euros would probably do the trick but why waste time on reductio ad absurdum (is this reductio ad absurdum? ok, for the sake of posterity let's just pretend it is.) Oh looky 'ere guv'nor it's already past midnight! And yet I don't feel sleepy in the least. Wonder why I doze off so quickly at my friend's place though. I miss her bed. Maybe I'll go kip at hers tomorrow as well.

Post dissertation blues

Ehm, never thought I'd be moping about after finishing my dissertation, but here I am. I actually kind of miss how my life was back then, when I was being literally eaten alive by my dissertation and neverending drafts/editing.

So, here's to:

1. the long hours at the med school's library, which is right behind our dorm
2. the nine to twelves, and ones to sixes, coming home to cook a quick dinner, catch a nap, and then heading off to the cafe to work till midnight
3. loads, and loads, and loads of mcflurries, and cheeseburgers and everything on the budget menu in general
4. getting to know all the mcdonald's staff
5. the grad study room, and all the cool people I met there
6. those hilarious moments when we would go around handing out snacks and fruit to everyone else in the room
7. putting my feet up on the sofa in the cafe, and in the grad study room
8. THE CHAIRS.
9. barely going to the supermarket, and living off instant ramen/instant soup/frozen food
10. seeing the foxes nose around the cafe every night
11. walking through the campus at midnight, back to the dorm
12. getting to sort of know everyone else at the library, since it was basically just the same old bunch showing up every day
13. just the whole experience of writing, formatting, sighing, eating, thinking and refining my argument
14. eureka moments when everything made sense.
15. living in the library.
16. I am growing increasingly incoherent. Maybe I should just stop.

Maybe I'm getting old. Nostalgia setting in and all, graduate blues. And thus I conclude my masters. Now for central and eastern Europe.