I had a dream the other night where I flew back to Vancouver, opened up my computer, and then realized with great sadness that I didn’t have a lot of friends to reach out to there anymore. It has been a long time now since I have traveled a long distance or flown. I’ve certainly felt aware over the years that reticence or refusing to travel has had adverse impacts on my career as a civil servant and later as a PhD student. I could have stayed much more in touch with fellow Oxford alumni if I had made it back to England for my graduation and subsequently. My years of the MPhil in Oxford are now in some sense distant in my mind, though it was 2005-07. Those were intense years and a remarkable group of people, some of whom I continue to exist in social media friendships with and think of very fondly, albeit with the distance of many years and often some children as well on their part.
I’m glad to be steadily progressing toward measurable endpoints with the dissertation. Task 14/59 complete for necessary objective A, and so on. It creates a strange routine in life for me, but it’s probably more of a shifting of what has always been a strange routine in some ways. I can be more inclined to experiment just for the sake of novelty and curiosity than to try to maintain a strict routine, though I know some people live extremely happily in all sorts of other lifestyles.
Anyway, it’s all a demanding task and unaccountably tiring, but I think I will have a draft manuscript by early August.
