Night in

Gripped by a sudden loneliness in the cold emptiness of our four walls, I realise that this is the first night ‘in’ that I’ve spent in a while. But I also realise that it’s the first of many to come in the next five weeks, in which I am going to write my master thesis. Tonight I wrote the first words of it and – most importantly – the table of contents, which gives me a certain (though certainly false) feeling of achievement. Haha!
Having recently changed my thesis topic, I now have to start over almost from scratch with no extra time till the deadline – the last day of December. A hundred pages in less than thirty days… outch! And here’s to another last-minute effort… My whole academic career has been marked by these, though admittedly it was ‘long overdue’ more often than ‘last minute’. This time, it will require some kind of magic to make it the latter rather than the former, as I have no desire of spending the days between Christmas Eve and New Year shivering huddled over my laptop, sipping coffee and typing mysteriously incoherent sentences into the keyboard as a result of ‘overworked brain syndrome’, tiredness and frustration. Though a pessimistic part of me sees it coming just that way – I’m mostly optimistic, thank God!