So this was fun. My PhD advisor, who has been on ‘sabbatical’ since early June last year and who I haven’t heard boo from, is turning out to be massive bully… Uncle Fuckin’ Bully (a la Once Were Warriors style). It feels like he’s constructively attempting to get me to quit the program since he found out that I applied for special exam conditions at the end of last semester’s Latin unit… because, well, sitting still for three hours with no breaks is physically impossible for me, and even though he’s been absent forever, he’s realizing I’m more broken then he thought.

Before he took me on, I informed him that I had been in four nasty car accidents, have ongoing chronic pain issues as a result of that accident, which is why I am not in gainful full time employment, but am pursing a higher research degree instead. I did not go into depth about my medical condition – because quite frankly, it’s none of his damn business how I manage my health and the results from my Hons year and my academic references stood for my capacity to undertake PhD study. And then on Friday while I was waiting to find out if our son’s dog was going to die… I get this:

From: Dr. Fuckin’Bully
Sent: Friday, 25 January 2013 10:06 AM
To: Borys
Cc: NZ Co-Advisor; RHD Advisor; RHD Admin Office
Subject: contact and meeting
Importance: High

Dear Borys,

This is my fourth attempt to contact you over the past two weeks. As stated in my previous emails (Jan. 8, 11, and 18), it’s imperative that we meet to discuss your research progress. There’s really no excusing this prolonged period of email silence, especially given that Takashi and I have extended the deadline for your literature review to Jan. 31. As such, we expect that you are working full time towards meeting this objective. If you are away on vacation, this also complicates the situation, as no consultation was sought beforehand.

Please get in touch ASAP.

Dr. Fuckin’Bully

Wow, holy fuck! I had no idea. Went hunting for said emails feeling awful the whole time that I hadn’t replied. Checked my spam box, checked my junk mail filter, signed directly into the Uni email portal thingy in case something hadn’t been redirected and found NOTHING. And then I thought, ‘Hang on… I’ve been getting every other email from everyone else in the RHD office et al., why wouldn’t his stuff be coming though?’ At which point, I called ‘SHENANIGANS ON YOU AND YOUR FOUR EMAILS, SIR!!!’ Fucking bastard. So, why is he trying to make out like I’m some sort of recalcitrant teenager skiving out of my work?

Well, Dr. ‘I’ve-Been-Completely-Absent-And-Neglectful-While-On-Sabbatical-For-The-Last-Six-Months-And-Now-I’m-Back-I’m-Gonna-Start-Pushing-You-Around’, advisor type dude… you’re about to find out that I am not one who like this sort of crap. When you push at me – I shove back.

Sigh… sometimes I feel like my whole life is pushing shit uphill with a shovel. O_o

If it isn’t one thing it’s another. Seems like I push shit uphill all the time. So much so, I just about push shit uphill for a hobby. I push shit uphill so much, I reckon, I’ve almost turned it into an art form. Hell, sometimes, I push shit uphill just for fun. And on occasion I’ve even been known to push other people’s shit uphill because they’re not as accomplished at it as I am! Well – we is made of sterner (and stubborner) stuff than what he is probably accustomed to. And so I replied thusly:

From: Borys
Date: Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 11:23 AM
Subject: Re: FW: contact and meeting
To: Dr Fuckin’Bully;
Cc: NZ Co-Advisor; RHD Advisor; RHD Admin

Dear Dr. Fuckin’Bully
Welcome back! Unfortunately, this is the first communication I have had from you since the 3rd of December, 2012. I have not been away from my email at all, and have had no problem with any other emails from the RHD office or any other UQ email addresses during this time. I have checked both my spam and junk mail filters and logged directly into the UQ email portal looking for the emails you mentioned below but have found nothing on those dates or any other. I have received no emails from yourself, from my NZ Co-Advisor or the RHD Advisor across this period.

I am distressed by your implication that I have been avoiding my email communications, and by inference my obligations. I have never been informed when to expect you back in the country, nor of the date of your anticipated return to work. Please feel free to re-forward the emails from the dates mentioned below, I would be grateful not to have missed anything. Additionally, if you ever have trouble contacting me in the future, I am always available by phone.

As per our agreement, I have been working full time across the summer period towards the literature review which is due next week. Though I am unsure if it will meet your requirements as you have provided no information regarding your expectations. I have no criteria, no direction, no advice or input regarding this document. When I mentioned this to the RHD Advisor during my meeting with him during your absence in December, he said it was ‘difficult to define expectations on a literature review’, and emphasized that I needed to ‘exercise my own judgement regarding the output’. I look forward to catching up with you soon.

Regards

Borys

Two can play at this game. I call your bluff, Sir – with the three people you Cc’d into your insulting email watching on. How dare he imply that I’ve been avoiding my responsibilities. Anyone who knows me (even a little) is aware that I’m not only fastidious and focused when I set my mind to something, I’m downright doggedly determined and obsessive compulsive! I am so task oriented, that the psychs have often said it is a character ‘flaw’ that is so overdeveloped as to be detrimental to other aspects of my life, and even my own health and sanity! Well, we will wait and see how Dr. Fuckin’Bully reacts.
Nearly an hour later…

From: Dr. Fuckin’Bully
Date: Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 12:19 PM
Subject: Re: contact and meeting
To: Borys (What? didn’t want to Cc your buddies into this any more?)

Borys,
If you’re around on campus, why not pop by my office after lunch, say around 2pm? Otherwise, let’s meet on Tuesday at 10am.

Dr. Fuckin’Bully

Well, how do you like that? No… ‘Here’s the copies of the missed emails you failed to answer’. No… ‘I don’t have your phone number’. No… ‘That’s not what I meant’, even.
No excuses, no explanations, no apologies. But also no continued insistence that I was deliberately ignoring him. Prick.

Sounds like it’s time to go shopping for a new advisor…

I’m currently engaged in writing a literature review.  Which would be fine if I knew what one was.  I have no criteria, no parameters, no guidelines, no word count, no content requirements, no assessment weighting… basically no fucking idea what they want.  And when I asked the RHD advisor what these things normally look like, I got this response:

“Basically they won’t know what your literature review should look like until you’ve done it.”  Why? Oh why, does that sound like I’m destined to re-do it in it’s entirety regardless of what I give them?

To the best of my knowledge it’s supposed to demonstrate a suitable engagement and understanding of current scholarship relating to my topic… and that’s all I got.  So basically I’m pfaffing around writing things like:

“Dr Wanker asserted in his seminal work on widgets of 1972, “Widgets! Haa! What Are They Good For?”, that blah-di-blah-di-blah was the prevailing perception across the period in question regarding widget use, distribution and type specific popularity.  Wanker’s theory of thought regarding widget usage was widely accepted and sustained until it was robustly refuted in Dr Prat’s lauded compendium “A Brief History of Widgets: An Essential Handbook for Anyone Enraptured by the Haunting Complexities of Widgets” which, citing interesting new developments and statistics relating to widget expansion into blah-di-blah-di-blah.  Today, Dr Prat isn’t alone is his assertions, he is also joined by eminent Professor of Widgetry, from the prestigious Widget University, in his recent journal article “Everything You Never Needed To Know About Widgets” leaving us with the commonly held assertion that as pervasive and popular as widgets are they are still blah-di-blah-di-blah, fucking useless.”

One thing I can tell you for certain.  While this blog may well be 99% nonsense and 1% indignation (Okay, okay maybe 5-10% indignation), it is good for one thing – keeping you in the habit of formulating your thoughts into the written word.  I haven’t had to write an analytical research essay, a journal article, scholarly presentation or anything even vaguely in that ball park for over a year, but have taken straight back to it like a duck to water (I hate mixed metaphors but I did it to you anyway).

Academic writing is a particularly nasty sort of beastie that doesn’t even remotely resemble it’s more refined cousin – also known as, literature – I have recently found that having an almost daily habit of dumping your thoughts into informal and often hastily written words, even in this, the most maligned of formats – the blog – appears to have held me in good stead for returning to organizing and analyzing my thoughts and subsequently spewing forth the necessary bastardized, verbose, circumlocutive, enjargoned, and strangulated academic writing when required!   🙂

Who’d have thunk?  Blogging might actually be good for something!   :o)

Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been pretty much agnostic to borderline atheist most my life, which by and large means I don’t care a great deal for organized religions (probably due to my Catholic upbringing), but after this evening, I can unequivocally report there is indeed a Hell… and it appears to be full of Latin.

Now, I am a not exactly an unaccomplished student.  I have completed more than my fair share of coursework, assignments and exams over the two degrees I have completed so far.  But nothing, and I mean NOTHING prepared me for the nightmarish experience that was the Latin exam I took tonight.  And this is for LATN1110… a first year undergrad course studying an ancient, and presumably dead, classical language.  For the life of me I can’t figure out a situation where any of us will be needing to read/translate any Latin without being well armed with text books and dictionaries, but our lecturers (God bless their cotton socks) obviously feel otherwise and are desirous that we learn the language by rote.

And herein lies the rub.  Because dead though it may be, Latin appears to be exceedingly convoluted.  There are 36 different ways to say ‘mine’ and 36 different ways to say ‘yours’… and here is one that’s been doing my head in since we learned of it a couple of weeks ago – there are 36 different ways to say the number ‘one’.  Half of which are fucking plural!  FUCKING PLURAL NUMBER ONE!!!  Figure that one out.  Grrrr.   So we are all learning out tables, some are making flash cards and attempting to rote learn verb conjugations, noun declensions and shit like that.   I spent most of last week pulling together tables of the learning vocabularies for each section we’ve done so far to use as study aids and spent all of yesterday writing and re-writing interrogative pronoun and demonstrative adjective tables, and reading through several weeks of translations to gain a working familiarity with what we are told will be expected of us.

Only to get in the exam room tonight and suffer a more than a few total brain farts.  Seriously, I’m only just recovering now and the exam finished three and a half hours ago.  I mean I completely pooched about half a dozen words we learned in the first few weeks that I suppose should be second nature by now.  But I’m hazarding a guess that this is the nature of the beast.  You try and cram this shit into your head so you can regurgitate it on demand, and you think (futilely hope) that you know it, but then you’re faced with that bit of paper, you find yourself staring at it going “WTF is that?”  Like you’ve never seen it before.  :S

Oh well, the upside is that it’s all over for the semester and now I can get stuck into my own research during the break.  Massive downside though… by the time I’m lining up for LATN2120 next semester, I will have totally completely and utterly forgotten absolutely every little iota of information that I did manage to retain.   Sigh… I’m such a goldfish.