La Vie En Rose for 2007 October 15

I met up with Kate, the girl from the seminar last week, and we walked over to Lambs Conduit Street to have healthy wraps and explore the possibilities of a new HQ, since I am missing my Dagny's. Fortunately manages to avoid going into one of the many charming looking bookstores around. Bloomsbury is like used bookstore central, which is both good and bad. Empty bookshelves seems to say to me I have permission to buy as many books as I want. Luckily I can get some cheap ones here. We chatted about how finishing PhD seems like, getting married and having children--like something that happens to other people. But then again you can't really say "I never met the right thesis." Found a likely looking cafe and stayed on to work on Serbian homework. The others in my class are a great bunch of people. Classes are always really amusing. I often wish I were on the MA course there when they are talking about their course work. It sounds really interesting but much less intimidating then coming up with a thingy and doing it all myself. Tomorrow I am meeting with my supervisor to go over possible chapters. It's all very vague because I don't know whether I will be doing all the allies or just the British and look at the French and Serbs in relation to the British. To be honest, it will probably be the latter because of the sheer amount of time it would take me to do the equivalent amount of research in French and Serbian (a lot of which would probably have to be in archives in Paris or Beograd/Novi Sad). There is always post-doc I suppose! If anything I might just throw out the French, despite the fact that I know French much better. I can understand fairly well when I open up a book in French, but when I see all that Cyrillic my eyes just glaze over and it takes me a minute to work out whether the book might even be of use to me. (As in read the title.)

I am trying to work on my organizational methods. I spent most of tonight after dinner trying out Zotero which will save citations from amazon and library sites and let you add notes, etc. I like that you can tag things but I am not sure if the tiny notes thing will work out for my extensive notes on books, or how it will work on unpublished documents. Still, no better solution has presented itself. I have to do something. The sheer volume of sources is overwhelming. I don't know how I am going to read it all. I will have to learn to read faster.

Blah I feel so disorganized. I am having trouble keeping my head above the water and I shouldn't be allowed to own such modern contraptions as a phone because apparently I don't know how to work them. Also still no shift key. Now I am used to using only the right one. And still now job. Sent in a few tutoring application thingies. Maybe tomorrow night will go through job websites looking for something lame. I really don't know where the day goes. I have to try to start going to bed soon because for some reason I find it really hard to get up in time for breakfast. Everytime I get back on track I ruin it by sleeping in again. Wish I could just go with my natural rhythm, get lots of work done at night anyway, but oh well. I have lots of good new books from the SSEES library because I get a library card there as a PhD student! unfortunately I am only allowed 5 books at a time. This is madness I tell you! I would like to tell them that at American libraries you are allowed like 30 books at one time... and graduate students can check them out for the whole term (actually this is not true at CSUB). Suppose I should feel lucky I am allowed to take the books at all. Blah blah blah ok enough blatherings. I know I am forgetting to do something tonight.