nori maki, MSc.

catharsis!

today was what they call a tremendous day.

text & context was cancelled, so i was able to finish up my final thesis corrections early in the morning. my second reader had returned the manuscript to my supervisor, who'd relayed that 'there is not much by way of corrections,' which was great news, but before i actually laid eyes on the manuscript, i had no idea whether he was basing that judgment solely on the amount of ink on the paper. i had paranoid spells of wondering if it'd be covered in short comments that would take a lot of time to correct. 'rewrite,' for instance, or 'this is all wrong.'

it was just a few casualties of editing here and there. it took me about 25 minutes to fix up the thesis, another hour to distill it, then yet another hour waiting for kinko's to print it up (77 dollars for three copies!?).

i had a design midterm, but besides one question that i sort of blanked out on, the rest of the questions were pretty awesome. 'what is CMYK?'

i haven't had a midterm like that in a long time. i love my design instructor.

anyway, right before i left harbour centre, ZBP came by with thomas's (well, now my) computer! yeah, the one i'd been waiting since the end of september for. i haven't played with it yet, but i've got it.

as soon as i got onto ubc campus, it was a whirlwind of errands: get thesis signed by my second reader, drop off dmac's prayer flags and basil's tickets at the newspaper, get thesis signed by supervisor, run to the faculty of graduate studies...

i got in by the skin of my teeth; at 3:56. the office closes at 4, officially. i thought they were going to give me a hard time about there being colour in my thesis, but the lady reviewing my thesis didn't really say much about it at all.

'so you know this colour won't show up in microfiche, right?'

'yeah, i know.'

'okay. i just wanted to make sure you knew.'

she signed some forms, accepted my thesis, and now i have an MSc!

i went and had a great long talk with the hilariously flamboyant grad secretary, then i ran into MTh on the way out the building, who bought me tea as we sat and caught up for a while.

got to chat with dmac for a bit, then went to say hi to my sweetie in the lab. he ended up relenting after not too much arm-twisting and came out to dinner with me at the vietnamese noodle house. i haven't had dinner with my sweetie in a long time.

finally, the night sky was almost completely clear -- perfect conditions to see the lunar eclipse.

oh, and thomas should be getting into town sometime tonight. whee!

now, i am at home, wrapped in a blanket, warm and happy.

***

i have been invited to no fewer than three different election-watching parties. i am torn.

today at school, i was given a $25 gift certificate to the sfu bookstore because i could spell more words from the letters in "publish" in three minutes than anyone else in my class.

i feel special.

so i didn't want to jinx it, but i guess there's no point being irrationally superstitious.

i submitted my thesis to a second reader yesterday.

my excitement is subdued, since it obviously isn't a done deal yet. with any hope, i'll be done before the end of this month.

now i wait. i hope the second reader doesn't ask me to rewrite the whole thing.

also, i now have to do a presentation about my thesis work in november; some requirement of the physics department that i didn't know about. i know i'm being utterly paranoid, but i'm afraid i'll give my presentation, and someone will ask me a simple question i totally can't answer and somehow, someone will rescind my master's degree.

ugh.

why do i care, anyway? i'm getting a new master's. maybe 'cause i figure i'm owed a degree considering how much the thesis shortened my life.

***

my text and context prof sort of offered me a 'project manager' job today. it was weird. i thought he was proposing an internship, but it turns out it's for an academic journal grant proposal that's due in april. i want to do it, but i'd be so swamped. it'd be paid though. the more i think about it, the more i really want to be involved. i just don't know if i can handle the workload.

i don't know what to do for my internship. you, reading this: what do you think? i'm being torn in 6 different directions:

(a) ccsp press: the canadian centre for studies in publishing (the department that runs my mpub program) is going to be starting up its own press. tentatively, anyway. i'm totally stoked on being involved in this academic press right from the beginning. i think my internship report would be really relevant and hot.

(b) MOMENTUM: my beloved MOMENTUM is coming back...? that's the rumour, anyway. if it's being relaunched and the timing is right, i'd want to be involved. i could do editorial, design and management for a magazine that i love. i'm sort of wary of working for a publication that seems perpetually on the brink of collapse, though. i guess that doesn't really leave me with that many options.

(c) arsenal pulp press: small press that prints a load of really really awesome titles. they also share an office with geist. i think i could learn a lot, but the student who interned there this past summer says that she was relegated to menial duties. also, she didn't get paid.

(d) adbusters: talked to a dude at media democracy day and they seem amenable to taking interns. i'm not sure if i'd rather work in their editorial or design departmenti don't know if i'd be paid, though -- almost seems counter to their philosophy. that typically wouldn't be a concern for me -- lord knows i've done my fair share of unpaid thankless work out of love for the publication -- given my current situation, i'd sort of like to make enough money to eat.

(e) bcamp: the bc association of magazine publishers. one of the other students in the program used to work there and said there would be a lot to do. i've always wanted to work for a publishers' association and do some policy work. i don't know if i'd be paid, though.

(f) ubc press: i'd be on the ubc campus (where my sweetie and old friends and the ubyssey are) and, according to one of the students in the program last year, her supervisor asked for a report to be turned in at the end of the summer, meaning that she was essentially done her internship report for the program before september. also, she was paid.

mhmmmmm...it's something to mull over. i talked to my prof about all of this today, and he said 'they all sound like viable options.'

doesn't really help me make a decision. *shrug*

oh god, i want to die. or kill. actually, mostly kill.

i was supposed to submit my final draft to my second reader tomorrow. my supervisor gave me his corrections on friday and said he'd like to do a final minor edit (ugh) before i submitted the thesis. i told him i'd try to get it to him early afternoon on sunday and if he sent it back to me with a minor copy edit, i could probably have it to him monday morning.

he sends me the 'copy-edited' version, full yet again of retarded corrections of digitally scrawled corrections on the PDF, some of which didn't even make grammatical sense, as well as one thing that he perceived to be an eggregious omission that, he says, "i should have caught earlier."

fuck you. fuck you!

"why didn't you vary pitch?" he asks.

uh...because you told me i didn't have to? now i'm not sure what's happening. i have to make all sorts of additions that are going to take a ridiculous amount of time, and my second reader probably won't get it back in time if i submit it too late. and i have to get the final version in by 31 october, or i'm humped. financially, that is. also, the book project at school (real school) is picking up. these next three weeks are going to be utter hell.

fuck.

ROAR!

no, i think this is a rare occasion that merits numerous exclamation points.

ROAR!!!

***

however, i did make home-made spinach-ricotta cannelloni tonight. it was yummy. it almost makes up for the fact that it's almost 2 am and i'm still not done my thesis. actually, it really doesn't.

sigh.

here's a harrowing thought: a simpsons live-action movie.

once the simpsons finally goes off the air (not soon enough), it'll take a generation for it to sort of peter out, then some ass in hollywood's going to cast the spawn of freddy prinze jr. and sarah michelle gellar as bart.

it's going to happen. you know it.

with any hope, i'll be long dead. if not, i guess i'll just have to burn something down.

***

after getting my latest round of corrections from my supervisor, where he:
(a) re-corrected passages that he had corrected in the first place, essentially restoring them to the way they were in the first place
(b) corrected certain passages and inserted rather substantial queries that he could have (and should have) been dealt with on, oh, the first or the second reading, maybe? yarrgh. frustrations...

...i put my foot down and gave him an ultimatum. this next version i send will be the final one, i told him. the one to be sent to the second reader. no more changes! if there is still something heinously wrong with it, he should have caught it sooner, i say. if i submit any later than 31 october, i'm out another $300, which, as you'll recall from a couple of posts back, i cannot afford.

he seems to have responded well to it, so it looks like, after this weekend, i'll be ready to send the damn thing to a second reader. then, a week later, i should have any last corrections done. then i submit, and with any hope, i'll never have to talk to anybody about fucking photonic fucking crystals fucking ever again!

some of my publishing friends are urging me to have a big party when i finish. i think they just want me to buy them booze and cook them food.

***

i really really want to see team america. but i'm po'. also, i have no time.

some random shit:

-nobody seems to be reading this blog anymore. *shrug*. probably my fault for not making it more compelling.

-my kitchen is splattered with pumpkin (rightly pronounced 'punkin') bits. i probably expended more calories chopping up the pumpkin than i'll ever get out of it. soon, though, my house will be infused with the amazing aroma of pumpkin pie. the pumpkin that my sweetie bought was big and kind of stringy; i don't think it'll work that well for soup. but i did manage to get about two cups worth of seeds out of it, and i think the whole thing cost about 50 cents.

-i think i'm more or less done my thesis. i don't want to get too exuberant about it prematurely, though -- that was my mistake last week, and when i was brought down, it put me in a foul mood for days. i'd like to have a party for everyone i've ever complained to about my thesis, but unfortunately, i'm po'.

-i was supposed to get thomas's ibook this past week, but no news from ZBP, who was acting as courier. maybe she just decided to keep it for herself?

-this will be the first year in three S&A and we won't be having thanksgiving dinner, and it's sort of bumming me out. i feel like it's the first in a list of traditions that we developed to support each other during the hellish experience of our master's degrees to die and that more will soon follow.

-my house is a total disaster. there is paper everywhere, a pile of dirty dishes and clothes strewn throughout the apartment. i know how i'll be spending my holiday tomorrow...

i am po'.

my sweetie calculated our finances this weekend and found that with his reduced income, my lack of income, our mortgage payments and other bills, we are left with roughly $2 per meal.

shit.

anyone want to have me over for dinner?

"you need to make it more a thesis and less a list of facts."

that's what i got out of my meeting with my supervisor.

he didn't even seem to notice my "thesis schmesis" shirt.

actually, it's a "thesis shmesis" shirt, by virtue of the chick at bang-on's screw-up. and i realized yesterday that every time i wore the shirt, i'd have to explain that to people around me. it has already grown tiresome.

also: i hate taking the bus home at the same time rez trash is trying to get off campus. i want to submit my thesis so that i never have to do that again.

i thought i was so close. so close. i've been almost done my thesis for the past month now, and it's really starting to piss me off. now, after this meeting with the supervisor, my workload for tomorrow's just been doubled.

excellent.

some good stuff did happen today, but i'll post about that later. now i must froth.