Today she asks, "So are you having fun doing this?"
"Yeah, if you mean the sadomasochistic kind of fun.."
"I hope you're getting something out of this."
Money?
From the past few weeks ploughing away at countless edits and waiting for her to send her drafts over, I have come to the conclusion that to be an academic is a long and lonely journey. You have only yourself for company when you're typing the ten thousandth word. And then there's the scary process of submission, wondering if you managed to sync everything with the APA format, checking and rechecking and being paranoid about whether you missed anything out.
Research assistants provide horrid company, especially when they make uninformed comments about your work.
Today I said in passing that her Results section seems like it was written by a different person - not in a bad way; it was a lot tighter and cleaner than the meandering introduction that she wrote for her dissertation -- and she lapsed into a fit of verbalised worry. I stood by and bit my nails wondering what thread I unravelled.
I figure at the end of the day, no matter the age, occupation, status, wealth, we are all tadpoles in the longkang of life, swimming towards the Deep Blue Sea.
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