{"id":1547,"date":"2007-05-14T22:20:51","date_gmt":"2007-05-14T20:20:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/05\/14\/the-story-so-far\/"},"modified":"2007-05-15T22:38:00","modified_gmt":"2007-05-15T20:38:00","slug":"the-story-so-far","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/05\/14\/the-story-so-far\/","title":{"rendered":"The story so far&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>Because this phase of intense self-absorbed navel-contemplation passing off as <a href=\"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/05\/03\/mu\/\">thoughtful meditation<\/a> just isn&#8217;t about to end now&#8230;<\/i><\/p>\n<h2>the Good<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Last week&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/04\/30\/holidays\/\">blitz-vacations in London<\/a> were everything I needed (quite possibly a few things I didn&#8217;t need too). I unfortunately didn&#8217;t have time to travel to the countryside and say hi to the family (hi auntie, sorry I didn&#8217;t make it), but I got to catch up with many longtime-not-seen friends, met a few cool new people etc.<\/li>\n<li>This week, funding was approved on a research internship I had a applied for, back in February. As a result, I will be spending the Summer in Tokyo, perfecting world domination plans and my army of killer robots at the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/National_Institute_of_Informatics\">NII<\/a>. That is, if I don&#8217;t decide to drop out and retreat to a Zen monastery instead. And it is far from excluded at this point.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m &#8220;brilliant&#8221;. More to the point: I am no longer the only person in the world to publicly hold that unflinching opinion of myself (see below).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>the Bad<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Being &#8220;brilliant&#8221;, I am therefore &#8220;way too smart to be wasting time on such trivial matters as those affecting my mood and the quality of my work these days&#8221;. Sayeth a certain advisor of mine.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Fuck you&#8221;, or a somewhat equally disparaging and hardly more articulate variation on the term, <em>may<\/em> have been my reply to said advisor and coincidentally depositary of a good share of my academic future.<\/li>\n<li>Despite today being the first day of final exams week (more like the French equivalent of post-grad quals, actually), I have yet to open a single revision book or prepare for any of it. The cause may lie in aforementioned trivial matters of the heart or, more likely, in the sudden realization that I might be heading the way of that very advisor&#8217;s somewhat pathetic, if highly regarded in academic circles, life and career.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>the Ugly<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>In fact, for reasons I can&#8217;t fully fathom (although there sure are a couple leads to follow), I seem to have caught the academic-self-doubt bug at the most unbecoming time. I honestly don&#8217;t think I will act on it, but the fact I can&#8217;t bring myself to even find interest, let alone try and revise for those rather important exams, seems a pretty efficient passive-aggressive way to get there nonetheless. <\/li>\n<li>Irony of ironies, I think I may have done pretty well today in spite of my utter lack of preparation, which still leaves the question open for the remaining 4 exams I am to take (not to mention, yearly lab project, due next week).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I suppose I still have ten hours (sleep notwithstanding) to acquire a motivation, snort 10g of crushed Red Bull powder and catch up on two weeks worth of revisions. <\/p>\n<p>Will I ? Fuck if I know. Suspense is killing me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Because this phase of intense self-absorbed navel-contemplation passing off as thoughtful meditation just isn&#8217;t about to end now&#8230; the Good Last week&#8217;s blitz-vacations in London were everything I needed (quite possibly a few things I didn&#8217;t need too). I unfortunately didn&#8217;t have time to travel to the countryside and say hi to the family (hi [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-insignificant-details","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1547\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}