Sometimes I'm convinced masochism is all that keeps me going

Yeah yeah, "I shall update this blog weekly!" and then vanishing for a couple months. Doesn't actually make any real impact on anything in the big scheme of things darnit.

So what's new? First academic essay of the year went better than I had hoped (I have a policy against publicly announcing my results because people who do that annoy me) which was a good start to my postgrad studies. Second essay... I'm getting it back tomorrow and am prepared for the worst tbh - the first half's actually quite good, the second is unreadable nonsense (which the cynic would say is the point of continental philosophy...) I've submitted the abstract for my self-directed study essay, which will be on the effects of de-ritualisation in the formation of protestant identity. Because why not? Oh and I'm currently working on a research proposal for a PhD, the deadline for which is mid-January.

Yeah, that last bit's the scary one. And not just because I've not even worked out the subject of my masters dissertation yet and I'm already trying to write a detailed proposal for my doctoral thesis! Honestly the hardest part is the nagging feeling of "is this good enough?" I have ideas, but I don't know if I can make them come together as a whole which is worthy of studying at that level. More to the point, I don't have the omniscience required to be sure that I'm not just rehashing someone else's work. I think it's original, but what if it's not? And indeed what happens if my ideas are all great, but nobody anywhere is willing to supervise me? It's a really strange experience.

Basically what I'm thinking of is, perhaps unsurprisingly, about philosophy of performance. More specifically I want to look at theatre, and at acting, and all that good stuff. Beyond that I'm... not exactly sure yet, Deleuze has a lot of ideas that are disturbingly close to what I want to look at but at the same time I'm loathe to abandon the Heideggerian approach. My instinct is to attempt to somehow combine the two - find new connections, create a new point of view but that's a lot easier said than done.

And to top it all off I think I have a cold.