it’s kind of strange having a thesis that’s been deemed defense ready. after i got that email telling me that i’ve spent the last few days kind of going ‘sooooo…. now what?’

obviously i still have to defend it and get it library ready, but really, essentially it’s done. that leaves me with a lot of time on my hands. and one class. which, sadly, hasn’t turned out to be much of a class anyway.

really, i have two more assignments for that class amounting to maybe 3000 words total and one presentation to come up with for my defense. and roughly two months of class time scheduled in this degree.

add to that the fact that in a few weeks i’m hitting the quarter century mark and it all points towards some kind of weird “where the fuck am i and what the hell am i supposed to do now…?’ moment. or moments.

you know the strange thing is that everyone says how worked up they get over their defense. i haven’t felt that at all. i know when I have to do it, but i shrug it off and start to think about which hike to go on next, what kind of camping gear i can find, staring at piles of laundry trying to figure out what to do with them, rereading books i’ve already read before…

i’m going to vegas for a few days in april, so at least i can suspend the ‘oh shit now what’ for a few days and forget the last two years. though, maybe that’s not fair cause i really enjoyed them even with all the bullshit they threw at me.

at this point last year I’d sit in the lab at harbour center and listen to last year’s defenders talk about their dedications and acknowledgements. i know who im dedicating mine to, i’ve had it in my mind since i started. i know who i’m going to put in my acknowledgements, but i also want to get some wisdom in from the late, great Douglas Adams.

i’m not that old, but i know years down the road when i pull this thing off some dusty shelf or out of some old box and try to remember exactly what i was thinking when i wrote it, i want it to say this at the start:

Perhaps I’m old and tired,” he continued, “but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied – Slartibartfast (H2G2)

i think that this is brilliant. i hope that when im old and befuddled (isn’t that an awesome word??) i’ll still be able to connect that sentence with all the work i’ll have done in life.

maybe that’s part of why i seem so eratic to myself sometimes. i get bored easily if things get repetitive because it’s almost as if there’s nothing left to try and learn. eccentricity and eraticism are probaby good at relieving that, even if they do sometimes cost time with things or people.

there’s a lot of wisdom in the Hitchhikers series. i think i knew that before, but rereading them has only made me realize it even more. there’s something inherently appealing about something so absurd.

who knows.

the one thing i think is constant is that nothing is ever constant. oooh, reverse logic. smrt. just like having sandals thrown at your head isn’t constant. or being BCC’d after posting jam sessions on youtube.

i’d much rather be happy than right any day. damn skippy.