"Write damn ye! what else are you good for!"...*
Doing a PhD is kind of like having a gangster in charge of your life. To quote Henry Hill: “That's the way it is with a wiseguy partner. He gets his money no matter what. You got no business? Fuck you, pay me. You had a fire? Fuck you, pay me. The place got hit by lightning? Fuck you, pay me.” In a PhD scenario you pay in words written and no matter how many you do it's never enough. Extenuating circumstances don’t enter into it. You could be curled up in a foetal position, your stomach in knots crying over the futility of it all, it doesn’t matter, you still have to get up, bleary eyed and cotton wool gobbed, and write the fucking PhD. You could meet the ostensible love of your live and rut like a maniac 24/7, it doesn’t matter you still have to get up, maybe with frozen peas on your bits, and write the fucking PhD. You could win the lottery, get run over, be abducted by aliens or accidentally elected the new president of an unstable South American country, it doesn’t matter you still have to write your fucking PhD.
On a less spectacular note, you could also do your back in like me from moving bastarding back-fucking barrels around.--See above!--it doesn’t matter I still have to write my fucking PhD. It’s a calling, we’re like film studies monks. It would be nice to go to a nightclub or the cinema this weekend like a normal person, perhaps one could meet that special someone, but it’s hard when you’ve got the psychological equivalent of the Ant Hill Mob poking a Tommy Gun in your back, saying: "Finish the fucking PhD...bub!" Show me a person that thinks doing his or her PhD is easy and I’ll show a person who is either a)lying or b) not thinking hard enough or c) a soulless robot from the future that is specifically programmed to write PhDs...I think I’ve met a few of them.
*a wee quote from James Joyce for high art brigade.
4 comments:
What are you talking about. It's a piece of piss. Just copy your supervisor's thesis. JS.
Interestingly, Monseigneur Lorcum, Bruce Robinson has that very same Joycean quote sellotaped to the inner lid of his word-processor, in order to spur him on as he launches himself into the abyss, fuelled on by red wine and a general acceptance of how important it is to write a load of bollocks about this buggering world. But I'm sure that's where you gleaned the allusion from. Sweet Media Magpie, get off my land. Bless!!
Haha, thank you noblest of badbrutes, I was racking my brains trying to figure out where I knew a James Joyce quote that wasn't from an Irish Tourist Board tea towel, a spine, an introduction or a backside blurb and it is of course from Robinson. "That's not what Goeff Wode would say, Geoff Wode would say: 'I'm going to pull your head off, because I don't like your head".Me...go... wread...komic...now.x
ok, I will then, you've convinced me.
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