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What a Year... (also a cake)
Dec. 27th, 2023 08:10 pmIt's been an absolutely crazy year for me, and now that I'm finally out of parties to attend and holiday-related tasks to undertake, I have another moment to reflect and say "Gee. I made it."
This is my first December in a long long time that isn't shaped by the vicissitudes of the academic calendar. It's the first time I hit the end of the year and do not have to face any final projects/grading/reports as to why my dissertation still isn't done/etc... There's actually been time to chill out without the roller coaster of end-of-semester crunch, and it's lovely. I finish my hours at my job and there's no giant pile of work that remains for me to finish on my own time. When I pick up a book, I no longer have to consider whether it will help with one of my chapters. I can direct my mental energies to reasonably intense tasks without thinking "Oh jeez, I need to be spending this effort chipping away in the academic prose mines." It's great. Beautiful. The sort of normal working adulthood life I've longed for.
January of this year seems like it could have been a decade ago. I got the doctorate, got a publication, got a job, and did a lot of miscellaneous fun stuff in the meantime. I feel that I genuinely just lived a lot throughout all of 2023, and I have a feeling that this is going to be something of a turning point in how I view the rest of my life.
As for some of that miscellany, one of the aforementioned parties was a potluck where I offered the host their choice of theme for the dessert I wanted to bake. They chose "Pikmin."
If you didn't catch this grotesquerie on tumblr, please appreciate some pictures below of the terrible thing I produced (an Empress Bulblax pinata cake stuffed with candy larvae):
( Read more... )
This is my first December in a long long time that isn't shaped by the vicissitudes of the academic calendar. It's the first time I hit the end of the year and do not have to face any final projects/grading/reports as to why my dissertation still isn't done/etc... There's actually been time to chill out without the roller coaster of end-of-semester crunch, and it's lovely. I finish my hours at my job and there's no giant pile of work that remains for me to finish on my own time. When I pick up a book, I no longer have to consider whether it will help with one of my chapters. I can direct my mental energies to reasonably intense tasks without thinking "Oh jeez, I need to be spending this effort chipping away in the academic prose mines." It's great. Beautiful. The sort of normal working adulthood life I've longed for.
January of this year seems like it could have been a decade ago. I got the doctorate, got a publication, got a job, and did a lot of miscellaneous fun stuff in the meantime. I feel that I genuinely just lived a lot throughout all of 2023, and I have a feeling that this is going to be something of a turning point in how I view the rest of my life.
As for some of that miscellany, one of the aforementioned parties was a potluck where I offered the host their choice of theme for the dessert I wanted to bake. They chose "Pikmin."
If you didn't catch this grotesquerie on tumblr, please appreciate some pictures below of the terrible thing I produced (an Empress Bulblax pinata cake stuffed with candy larvae):
( Read more... )
