Autumn blues
Or do I mean “browns” intead of “blues”? Blue seems like a nicer color, at least right now, when it’s easy to get too much brown.
Spent most of last week poking away at draft 3, which doesn’t differ materially from #2 except for a few changes to footnotes; he wants me now to cite papers which I can’t find any record of. And change a few words back to the ones I’d used in draft #1. This was when I wasn’t trying to realign the laser to start the next round of experiments, and stumbling over itty bits near the beginning of the job. (Sorry for the technical jargon on that.) It’s days like this that remind me that I’ve only been doing this stuff for a year now, instead of four. If I’d been doing it for four years, then I’d Know Something. Of course, I spent four years with one advisor and I’m still not particularly convinced I Know Something from that, except that the second advisor was a much better choice.
Maybe the hardest thing about autumn is that it’s too easy to look back on stuff. Spring is full of anticipation; summer is caught up in doing stuff in between mini-vacations; winter is dedicated slogging and cursing the snow. Autumn is realizing that it’s another semester closer to a defense.
Mini-vacation last night - watched Nosferatu and Psycho at the old-timey theater downtown. Live organ accompaniment on the first, since it wasn’t a talkie, which was actually very easy to forget about; it blended in a little too well, or something. Whatever they pay the organist, I’m sure it’s a labor of love, and perhaps of pride at being one of the few people around who does it. Psycho was much scarier; hard to get into the pace of the first, and too full of stuff which now seems accidentally comic, or at least comically unfamiliar. Stayed up much much too late as a result, so now I feel slightly unwell, with no more motivation than before to finish this final(?) draft of the paper by morning, and a long list of things to be done to waste time. This has been one of them, so I’ll stop now.