Whilst in New Plymouth I spent most of my time in Puke Ariki (best hot chocolate ever available on level one) watching someone I care for read forty years worth of local newspapers as she tried, valiantly, to reference what others had not. Seeing that I usually spend an awful lot of time in a library here in Auckland my holiday ended up feeling less festive and more worky than maybe it should have, but I survived/persisted/endured and actually got a whole host of work done (like the Episteme reviews, which were the culimation of several noting and annotating sessions).
And now I am back, and being back means getting back to work.
Work currently is preparing for my Med School teaching and trying to get the Testimony chapter polished up to the standard I require (a standard that then lets me get on to the next set of issues, such as disentangling what people (in Epistemology) mean by ‘Conspiracy Theory’). The Testimony chapter seems a little like a chore; it needs to be written to make sense of a particular move I am going to make in the conclusion of the thesis but as it is, for the most part, not on Conspiracy Theories themselves it feels dry, boring and little alien to the subject material (it isn’t alien, it just feels that way at the moment). This is, I am lead to understand, a common problem for PhD candidates; the things you want to write on often need conceptual propping up in what feel like well-tread and not-as-interesting areas. Motivating yourself to finish that conceptual groundwork is hard; it has to be done, but often the feeling is ‘Now?’
The answer is, of course, ‘Yes.’ Possibly with three (but no more) exclamation marks. I used to tell students that they were allowed three of those per essay, but even that would make me frown. I don’t like frowning. Like smiling, it makes my face hurt.
Try the veal.