Exciting Holiday News!!

Happy Holidays everyone! I am back in the States now visiting my family on the East Coast until January 5th. I'm happy to report that I've been having a great time relaxing, making gingerbread houses, and enjoying many glasses of wine.

In even happier news, I received an email today from the Young Lives Research project at Oxford and they officially offered me the job!!!!! I'm thrilled. It is a wonderful opportunity to contribute to work being done in developing nations while also alleviating my academic funding fears. So, in a nutshell, things are going extremely well. I hope your holiday season has been similarly full of joy. Much love to you all!

Done, done, done!

Just sent in my draft to my supervisor and I am officially DONE with my major commitments this term. This is the best feeling I've had in a really really really long time. I'm so happy I can't stop dancing (seriously, my leg is vibrating up and down as I write this). Current theme song: "The Sharpest Lives" by My Chemical Romance. Yep, you read that right. Any song that has the refrain "I've really been on a bender and it shows" has my vote for best song ever right now.

All those who haven't written me off entirely for being a completely negligent family member/friend, keep an eye on your inbox for an ecstatic email from me in the next day or so. ;-)

The day I became a historian

Today, it finally happened. I stopped having the mentality of a student and became a real honest-to-god historian. I didn't think it would happen until I actually received my DPhil, but I must have done something incredibly right over the last term. As I was writing today I realised that working on my thesis had ceased to be something stressful, or that I needed to do to meet a certain deadline, or to receive a certain degree. All of the baggage that necessarily comes with being a student has been somehow stripped away and what I'm left with is simply an amazing project that provides me with an opportunity to make early modern English history a little bit more "right." Man, I love Oxford. This place rocks.

editor's note: Then again, I currently need to drug myself with a Tylenol PM every night in order to fall asleep, so this newfound zen-like state is all quite relative. ;-)

I caught myself pacing today...

I've been consistently moving from one critical and time-sensitive activity to the next for over a month now and I've officially reached my "so productive I can't stop" mode. Juggling the demands of convening a seminar, networking with eminent historians, analysing 1,600 pages of parish demographic records (read: marriages, baptisms, and burials), trying to write a thesis chapter, and going through the selection process for my dream student job, has forced me to become super-regimented with my time. In many ways being this organised and productive is rewarding. However, continuing this way for so long has rewired my body/mind and now if I'm not always doing something that demands critical focus things go a bit haywire.

The result of this faulty rewiring seems to be the rather frantic pacing I caught myself doing today. I imagine I resembled a tennis ball bouncing back and forth across my room - perhaps the freakiest part was that I had no idea I was pacing until I had been doing it for quite some time. I tried to sit down and relax, but I would immediately pop out of the chair to go check my email, then to my sink to get a glass of water, then back to the chair, then back to the computer, then back to the sink...over and over, with only a few seconds in between each action. The whole time my mind was trying to figure out what I needed to be doing. I had just finished going through an interview and activity assessment this morning for the dream student job (I think it went really well - I'll know one way or the other by early next week!), and while I do have some writing that needs to be done by the weekend, I had planned a few hours of chill time as a reward if the interview/assessment went well. Unfortunately, my body simply won't let me relax, which is a big bummer when relaxing time is in short supply.

Ah well, at least I'm not pacing anymore. That has to be a step in the right direction.

PS - To all those who I owe emails to, I'm truly sorry for my lag in response. It's been a rather insane work period. I will be in touch soon!