At this point, I feel like I’ve got some kind of horrible experiment going on in the background to test the proportion of ‘normal’ weeks to chaotic weeks in my life as a PhD student. My last ‘normal’ week was about half-way through August, 10 weeks ago. I started this week with good intentions and a plan to do some peaceful, serene, data wrangling. It wasn’t exactly urgent, but I knew it would need doing eventually. Quite early on, the week veered so far off the rails, I’m really only talking about it because I made a pact with myself to write a PhD log. What happened is that my family’s close circle was struck by one of those devastating tragedies that do happen sometimes. Since then, quite a lot of my time has been eaten up being there for people while they try to put themselves back together. As for myself, I’m getting by on the fumes of self-defensive dissociation. Meanwhile, my data wrangling project got taken over by my business partner and husband, largely because he needed some displacement activity. He is currently trying to persuade Perl to wrangle every last minor detail of data into shape. This is despite the fact that in a one-off job like this, it would be much, much quicker to fix those last few details manually. But this is what he does, bless him. Every time. So I bypassed my original data wrangling project and moved on to the next non-dependent one. I also chewed some articles into chronologies. I made Christmas cake (because it needed doing anyway). And I watched a season and a half of Gravity Falls. But I certainly didn’t do anything that requires higher level thinking. At this point, I feel completely separated from the person I was at the start of the week and am doubting I will ever find the threads that were so abruptly broken. Oh yes, the other thing I did is I had my first official meeting with my supervisor. As far as I can tell, that went fine. I had done some work and have a plan for what to do next. Next week, I’m getting inducted again, this time into my funding body’s studentship programme. I was quite looking forward to it anyway. Now, the fact that they will structure my time and keep me occupied for a whole week feels both wonderful and necessary. Also, with all the events being on Zoom, I don’t have to leave anybody alone who shouldn’t be left alone right now.
