My good old friend Mr Pro. Crastination

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Hi Friends.

It's been a while, so since I have a lot of work to do I thought I'd write a blog! Clever me. But to relieve some of the guilt, I shall blog about work! Good call, clever me.

So, at the moment I'm (trying to) work hard on my dissertation (10,000 words, topic of your choice, by the end of March). Although - uh oh - I don't have a *specific* research question just yet, I'm basically looking in to/at lesbian speech.

'Woah!' I hear you cry, 'but Amy, *do* lesbians have a particular kind of speech?'

Good question, imagined reader. But please, no shouting. Whilst the answer to that is something I'll save for my 10,000 word count, I can tell you that I don't know. Personally, I'm not convinced they do, but others have tried really hard to find something. I guess that's the whole point of looking into it, right?

But anyway, in the last week or so it's a conversation I have had several times with various people. Luckily, not one person has said, how ridiculous!, or Oh, great, and shuffled away quickly. They've all been really - strangely - enthusiastic and interested. How lovely.

More interestingly though (to me) is what doing my research has taught me about myself. No, I am not about to come out as gay. Nice try. For although some of the reading has given me something of an existential crisis - who knew identity was fluid and gender culturally constructed? Not me, until Wednesday - what I've learnt about myself is more to do with my own abilities, academically or work-wise.

Slight tangent: I've also been applying for jobs/careers, it being that point in my life (FUCK!) where one does such things. Some of these applications involve timed aptitude tests, what a nightmare, where you look at a paragraph of writing and then have to determine the truth value of a sentence related to the passage. There's also a maths test, and often 'competency questionnaires'. All this can be a little soul-destroying, and sufficed to say I've yet to prove that I am sufficiently capable. It turns out the (tens of) thousands of granduates also desperately looking for futures are MUCH better at this than me. Sad, but true.

Back to the main plot (tho keeping our tangential friend in mind). So there I am reading lots about sexual identity and/or trying to do backwards percentages on the income of a fictional paper company and I realise, almost simultaneously, two things. One, I am nowhere near as intelligent as I used to be (at school) and secondly, I'm not actually that hopeless, so don't worry dear, there there, you will find employment, shhhh.

It seems that I simply have a terrible memory, particularly for detail, and that I read very slowly. After a whole day selectively reading bits of two books, I was surprised to find how much I'd taken in, as I drummed out a tidy 600 words on the topic (I'd been aiming for 200). But, a few days later, in the pub, stumbling upon a friend-of-a-friend who happned to be reading similar things from an Eng Lit perspective, I had very little to say for myself. Now, maybe it was because I was a pint and a half down, and she'd come from editing her essay five mintes before, but sufficed to say, whilst I recognised the words she was saying, I couldn't really remember much about what they meant or why they were significant.

This happens to me time and again, that I can remember concepts but not specifics, and it's kind of annoying. It's certainly going to make the dissertation slow-going. It also makes me think that actually, some of the jobs I applied for I wouldn't be very good at, if they required a lot of reading and digesting of information.

But look, this is not meant as a negative post - I'm not losing sleep over this. It's just an observation, and perhaps an important one in terms of determining what I do do with the rest of my life. (Not that I have any great ideas - all suggestions welcome. My biggest fear is to spend the next 40 years in a suit trapped in a grey box making Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.)

So, we shall see. Just thought I'd have a little vent. Now tho I have to comb through several articles on Communities of Practice. Things seem to stick if I read lots of stuff on the same topic, so better get started......

A x