8. I turned 25 3 weeks ago. I had a mini quarterlife crisis, but before that, I had to ascertain what the basis for ‘quarter’ currently is. 120 or 100? Most people think it’s 100. What did I do during my quarterlife crisis? I played Fun’s We Are Young on repeat and soulfully belted out the lyrics, until the boyfriend told me there was a package waiting for me at the reception. I went, and lo, he had bought and sent me a pair of RayBan aviators. No more crisis for now, please.
9. There hasn’t been a whole lot going on, except, I’m now beginning to panic about getting a job here or somewhere. Add to that, the fact that the boyfriend is leaving Europe tomorrow, so I have to at least think about finding a job in Nigeria, even if it’s only a halfhearted effort. I say halfhearted because I’m not quite ready to leave Europe, not sure I’d ever be. We have had some discussions about him coming back to Europe though, but these are more long-short term than immediate-short term plans and in the end, the likelihood is that it will be me moving back to Nigeria. Not now though. Please, universe, not now. About getting a job, I was holding off on applying until after handing in my thesis, which I will talk about in 13, 12, 11…
10. We had a long weekend this past weekend. Public holidays on Thursday and Friday, and most people travelled but what did I do? I was editing (what I thought would be) the final version of my MSc thesis. Special thanks to the boyfriend for staying up with me on Friday night (we went to bed at 4.00 am when the sun was beginning to rise again) to finish the draft. I spent Thursday monitoring how the price of Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged bird Sings rose drastically on Book Depository, following her passing; then reading (something set in 15th century Italy) and generally discovering that daytime television is quite uninteresting.
So, back to my boring thesis. Saturday rolled around and I thought oh let me just read through one more time and then convert to PDF and submit. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I was seeing such blatant errors that I wondered how my supervisor (who had read the other drafts,) managed to miss them. I decided that another round of editing was inevitable. Sigh. For starters, I didn’t want to bug the boyfriend again because he’s got his own exams this week, so I pulled out my Windows laptop. [I’m certain I’ve detailed why I abandoned that laptop somewhere on this blog.] For starters, it took about 45 minutes for me to get it to boot and open Google chrome. Fair enough, I spent the time editing on my Chromebook. Oh and, the events of this past weekend showed me that a Chromebook (can be, but) is not everything. I’ll spare you the details, but let’s just say I needed a Windows laptop for a lot of formatting. Right, so I had the laptop running, and then I started to edit, and save, etc. When I had finished, I decided it might be nice to re-label my figures/tables/equations. I had labelled them on my work computer before, but that was in Dutch and my home computer has English as its native language so I thought why not just redo it. And then when I was done, I clicked ‘Update Table’ (of figures), and my computer ceased to function. If I was a violent person, I would have thrown that computer against the wall in rage. I was shaking, and muttering an F bomb everywhere. I hadn’t eaten lunch (it was about 17:00 at this point) so I went to eat lunch, then I came back and began the gruelling process of trying to get the computer to work. I finally finished at 21:30, but only because the awesome boyfriend offered to help again. At this point, I could not bring myself to care about that thesis anymore, to be honest. Before I move on, a word of advice for anyone who owns or is considering ‘investing’ in a Toshiba Satellite Windows computer: Kill it with fire. [Maybe my own product was faulty/defective, or something. But I know I’m not a careless person. So it’s not my carelessness. Burn it with fire.]
11. Oh, I submitted the thesis alright. And then received (along with the rest of my classmates), 16 hours after submission, 7 documents in response to my submission. What are those documents, you ask? They’re a bunch of standards which our theses are supposed to comply with before they will be considered eligible for blah blah blah. You would think that these people would have been gracious enough to share these documents with us in January, before we began to write our theses. Do we look like we’re playing? [I’m sure one of them is chuckling softly at our misfortune. One of those documents is 58 pages long.] We had one document which detailed some standards to be followed. And I followed the standards in that document. Oh well. It will be done. Eventually.
12. So, I was holding off on applying for jobs because I thought I wouldn’t have time to prep and do all the aptitude tests. But now I must combine everything, because my internship is about to end and I’m not a fan of limbo.
13. Random: I remembered, this morning, that someone sent me a link in April to apply for a scholarship to Stanford Graduate School of Business. I shuddered when I remembered, at the thought of more school. I’m tired please. [Yes, life is a constant school, yadi yadi ya. I know. Go away.]
14. More Random: There’s someone on Twitter, @bimadew. She does this thing called Bim’s 10 Things every week, in which she lists 10 of her favorite things for that week. And she’s got such interesting things! They’re mostly pictures of people (e.g. Billie Holiday), but I find them very interesting. Now I’m thinking maybe I should find one favorite thing everyday. It will be like a happiness chore for me, to find something super interesting, without trying too hard. I’ll see if I can keep it up for 1 month straight, starting…tomorrow. Okay no. Today. Starting today.
15. Finally: I’ve gotten quite adept at bike riding, I now ride mostly on autopilot. I’m so chuffed for myself 😀
Sorry for the long read, and thank you for reading this far. À tout!
aix|en 