Outside: January night and a beautiful sky. Once in a while, I see people walk quickly by down the dimly lit street, head down, hoods up. Take away the 21st century crotch-hugging jeans and I imagine it's exactly like people walking around hundreds of years ago. Hooded Robin Hoods or cut-throats.

Inside, I've put my back out sitting at my laptop all weekend. Deadlines. One week into the new year and the work week has finally dragged me out of my harmonious New Year weekend and straight into a panicky tailspin of deadlines, research proposals, research projects and a sickening sense that I could work all day and all night and not make so much as a dent in the load.

This is something that I need to get my head around, and soon. During the thesis, I was entirely comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable sitting in a chair until my back hurt, feeling stressed about deadlines and living on toast. Is one meant to graduate from this when one graduates into full-fledged academia?

For now, it's probably enough that when I sit down to work all my cells and all my senses magically snap into place and I entirely fall into its arms willingly, peacefully and happily. As long as that keeps happening, I guess I have breathing space in which to craft a happy way to be.

Foreground:
Statistics in SPSS and a load of interview transcripts.

Background:
Harry Potter. Twilight. The Lord of the Rings. Narnia.

The real world. Other worlds. I like a healthy mix :)

Comic Relief for Development Studies.

"How to make out on scarce resources."
I swear to God, that is part of a chapter title for part of a book that is on my reading list.

Let me solve it for you buddy:
Making out on scare resources is a breeeze.

You need a dark room (no 'lecy bills). Two consenting horny adults (no shortage of those, we have a world population of...of... oooh I just had a fix on the number but it got away from me...) No phone (more saving on bills). No clothes (no fibre cultivation --> back to growing millets on hardly any water and marginal land. The savings there are too immense to even count off as a list here!). A glass of water for parched throats (This isn't asking too much, just one glass...). And severely rationed food supplies (since sex is perhaps the only way a starving populace could forget about its gnawing hunger for long enough to you know, actually ration available food; and we have enough grub to just-about-sort-of keep everybody going).

This combination of factors wasn't proposed by the UN and you won't find it an IIED report. But it's something people all over the world do everyday, successfully, and discover the elixir of youth and happiness in the process.
You see, this magical formula is nothing but what's otherwise known as Student Life. Visit any campus accommodation anywhere in this country and you'll see we already live like this. So it's tried and tested and hey we all look good and young and excessively becoming. Because well, we're coming... tra lah lah lah (*insert gormless guffaw here.) So it should be well on it's way to becoming official Policy. And being Upscaled.

How to make out on scare resources?
Is that a question for a serious academic tome?
Undergraduates up and down this soggy island can answer that one.
And by the time they're impoverished PhD students, they can write the fucking book!!
Bah. Bigwigs concern themselves with too trivial questions nowadays.


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*** Not that anyone is seriously reading this as a development studies blog, but if you are (God damn! Are you nuts?! How on earth did you get here?!), then puhlease, all disclaimers about this being Comic Relief apply. It's not and was not intended as a prescription for sub-Saharan famine relief. Duh.

Thoughts from the afterglow

I feel Neo-esque.
When he first sees the Matrix scrolling greenly down a computer screen, he’s flummoxed and stunned. As the movie progresses, his view of the matrix toggles back and forth between the numbers and the ‘real’ world that they represent.And then there comes a sort of epiphany; the views merge and he can see the numbers for what they are. He has grasped a new language.Of course, this is an imperfect analogy (aren’t they all?)But the spirit of the thing’s sort of the same.

Especially when you consider that I was once a little girl who used to cry bitter, desperate tears when faced with my math homework that no amount of cajoling or positive reinforcement (or, on occasion, a sharp smack from my father) could remedy. And now here I am, (resigned or victorious, you decide), not so scared anymore, and finally able to see that behind the big mass of 1s, 2s, 3s and graphs, there’s the world that I am just trying to understand.
(All caveats about the ability of statistics to elicit perfect understanding apply.)

I have learnt:

Not that it's of the least interest to anyone, but an obscure demographic: The state of Maharashtra, in India, is the second largest sub-national entity in existence in terms of its population.
This is the perfect explanation for why, unless I extend this PhD into a ten year full time job at the head of a team of 20 highly trained and better paid researchers, I should be perfectly happy to smirk that I can actually cover one measly taluka.

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Men are despicable.
No exceptions.
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It's my mother's birthday today.
Also the anniversary of her mother's passing.
Generation 1 slipped quietly into heaven on this day. Generation 2 is celebrating life and love and inshallah, yet another year of happiness, health and joy. Generation 3 is wondering if there's a priceless life lesson embedded into this particular date.
But mostly, she's instinctively grasped it, methinks, because she lived today to the fullest, wished her mother a happy birthday from the bottom of her heart and vowed to keep 'waking up' in the middle of the day every day and appreciating how precious it is that her loved ones are alive, happy, well, safe, warm (mostly), and, well, that she has more than she can count on the fingers of one hand. Which is twice more than anyone's deserved share, and infinitely more than hers.

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Those silk cushions I mentioned in the last post?
One of them has turned into a spectacular success. She is a snow white square (particularly apposite considering that the whole of England is currently this colour), and with a large square of blindly brilliant glittery flat silver sequins on the front. She's sitting in front of the other cushions on my bed and heh heh, she single handedly lights the room. And doesn't come with an off-switch. Goody.

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Just to reiterate:
Men are despicable.
No exceptions.
(Except definitely Papa and perhaps the cat.)

From ze blog, for ze fraands

... but it actually ended up in an email first, so I 'spose it should be the other way around.. Bah! I niggle. Ze point is zis! -

He-who-cannot-be-named has now mentioned the words post doc (like that, in quick succession, so I assume I understand him correctly and he was in fact referring to postdocs - as in, after the PhD) at two consecutive meetings. Be still, my heart. Oh dear. I knew this moment would come. I can see the horizon of this thesis. And just as I start to see the end of beginning approaching, he starts saying words like postdoc. Oh dear.
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Teachers' Pet?

So. Yesterday, I listed, pruned, crafted and drafted way into the night. Tappity-tapped my way to a comprehensive list of to-dos, did-dos, should-dos and can't-dos for The Shark (whose tan is faded, upon closer inspection. Poor dear. He was the object of my insanely poisonous envy until this morning.) The Shark raised an eyebrow one sentence in and pointed out that:
a.) He was pioneering the use of a new statistical technique and I would be his - gulp - co-pioneer.
b.) A paper is to be produced by this time next year (gulp) using this new technique.
c.) Of course I would be applying for a post-doc, on the strength of this (highly potential) publication.

This entire plan rests on an intricate web of potentialities flimsier than a lace doily.
I am scared of the words mean, median and mode.
What the fuck good is it to tell me of an advanced statistical technique that originated in computer science and with the good will in the world, I firmly believe should have stayed there.

On the one hand, I am most amazed he thinks I can grasp the stuff. On the other, am most annoyed that I should be steamrolled into this. The approach is interesting, and the thinking behind it does excite me, but I resent it being plopped into my lap and I resent being the pawn in the great war on Methods: all three supervisors have strong (divergent) opinions, and in every meeting, I am convinced by one of them that this is the best way to go!
Thanks man, but I'd like to decide it from now on.
Still, flattered you asked.