Here I am again after yet another long break from updating my blog. I did have the very best of intentions when I started this, but I find it hard to justify updating it when other things are happening. Also, as there is no single thing that I’m writing about this evening, this entry is probably going to turn into a miscellany of small events. My apologies.
I expect you’re all sick of hearing about my dissertation. Well, I’m sick of talking about it. However it is now completely finished with 80 footnotes, a bibliography, a contents page and various headings and formats. Roughly 9000 words of textual analysis that won’t interest anyone apart from the markers and myself. It feels a bit self-indulgent really, which is terrible because had I known I was going to be self indulgent in 9000 words then maybe I would have written about something more interesting to me.
Actually, that’s a bit of a lie. For all the stress and heartache that has gone into my dissertation this year, I have learnt such a lot from it and I am sorry that I no longer need to study Dante anymore. The fact is, it has taught me a lot about myself as a Christian and that is something I never talk to anyone about. Unless you are part of the Christian Union and mixing with zealous students, telling people around you that you’re a Christian can lead to awkward silences and embarrassed glances, so I never really talk about my faith to anyone. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have it though, and although the Divine Comedy is essentially a piece of fiction, it puts forward interesting theories on questions a Christian would ask themselves in a moment of doubt.
For those of you thinking oh no, she’s another evangelist trying to convert us, don’t worry. I still believe faith is a private thing and this blog isn’t going to turn into an energetic diary of divine proclamations, it’s just something I have been musing on recently and thought I would write it down before I forget it.
So, having finished the longest essay of my life and formatted the margins and double spaces, I had my second exam on Friday. Italian Oral. It didn’t go brilliantly, I’ll be honest, but I do feel relieved to have got it out the way. Italian is my stronger language, and Erasmus students and Italian friends alike often compliment me on my Northern Italian accent, but I was so sleep deprived and jittery on the day that I fluffed my verb conjugations, made the wrong points, and generally did not do very well. Non importa. I’ll just have to try harder in the written exams I suppose.
The weekend didn’t bring too much respite unfortunately. Exhausted from balancing writing, the exam, watching the election results (at least for as long as I resisted) and trying to keep up with the outside world and friends on campus, I was faced with working at the Open Day at the University on Saturday. Armed with the world’s bulkiest, most absurd mp3 recorder, I had to record welcome meetings to make podcasts for the website. I won’t bore you all with details of how nothing worked, how it tipped it down with rain, and how deeply offended I was by the attitude of an arrogant biology lecturer who didn’t know he was to be recorded.. so I’ll just mention the highlight of the morning when I bought a bottle of lemonade and opened the top to find the following message:
The average person spends two weeks of their lives kissing.
I’ll resist the temptation to revert to my grammar militant ways and state that the ‘lives’ should in fact be ‘life’, and ponder the reality of the statement. Two weeks. When I reflect on it, I guess it is a long time to be kissing consecutively with no breaks for eating or sleeping – hopefully it doesn’t make me a bad person to have initially reacted with ‘two weeks? That doesn’t sound a lot!’
And yet, it’s certainly a lot less than the amount of time I wasted on facebook in my first year alone. Now that makes me feel like I have wasted a lot of time whilst at uni.
