24 August 2012

Getting older, binning what we don't need

These are random thoughts: unrelated ones.

Today, I was cleaning out my file cabinet. What had I saved over the years? Notes, lots of notes about things I thought were important for my research 4 years ago. I had so many notes, articles I had printed out. Conference programmes. A never ending pile of paper. I binned it all: just like that. No going back and forth about it. Bin, bin, bin. And now I have an empty filing cabinet.

My thesis briefly hit 100,000 words today and I immediately deleted one of my appendix tables that I don't think I really needed, bringing me back to 97,500 words. There are enough things that the thesis is missing at this point that I can't afford to waste that space. 

There are little things I'm proud of in the thesis. My use of the en-dash between numbers, rather than a simple dash. 

I also have these contrasting overwhelming feelings of 'Oh my god, I actually did it' and 'I have no idea what I'm talking about'. Perhaps this is how it's supposed to feel at the end. I am also going back and forth between feeling like it's finished and feeling like I have months and months to go. I did, however, run into my supervisor and a person she's working with on her project, and in talking about me, she said, 'Stephen is nearly finished.' I'd never heard her say that. It was shocking. Really? I wanted to say. I'm almost done? 

Mia is walking now—how bizarre is that. Two years ago Yoko and I talked about having her for the first time. Two years. 'How time can move both fast and slow amazes me.'