Sunday 3 February 2013
Thank God january is over! :P
Dear
reader,
Gosh, am I
glad that January is over. I have told you I was busy before, but this month
really took the cake. However, before I will get into all that, I am first
going to write a bit about Christmas and New Years! :D
I had a
lovely Christmas. The first day I just spent with my parents, which was as nice
as always!... Except that an ant colony had made its home in our tree and
suddenly started to roaming about when we started to open the presents in the
morning. So whenever I went over to the tree to take up a present I wacked some
ants hahaha. I must say I didn’t feel like it was very much in the spirit of
Christmas (with peace on earth and all that), but what can you do?
I got some
really awesome presents, such as the DVD Arthur Christmas (which is one of the
most fun Christmas movies I have ever seen!), a paperblanks notebook (these are
rather expensive. I use those whenever I go to conferences, so I will always be
able to find the notes I took easily) and a book entitled Writing Death and Absence in the Victorian Novel by Jolene
Zagarovich (I really needed this book for my research). The best gift, however,
was my mom’s reaction to her present: I had gotten her tickets to a New Years
concert by Wibi Soerjadi (a famous Dutch pianist and composer).
New Years
eve we also spent together with my fiancé and his family, though this time it
was just my fiancé, me, my mom and dad, his mom and aunt. As we had expected
more people, we of course had waayyyy too much food hahaha.
The day of
the concert was on January the 3rd. It really was a big hit. Unexpectedly he
did a Disney medley from The Lion King and his version of the theme song of
Beauty and the Beast... He even did a piano version of Star Wars!!! :D And had
a medley of Queen songs as an encore. I mean how awesome is that! If you have
never heard of Wibi Soerjadi, you should definitely google or youtube him! ^^
It will be well worth your time!
Well then,
on to January. This month was just jampacked with deadlines. I had to present a
conference on a symposium entitled Love and Politics which was held on January 10-11.
I had to do quite a bit of research for this paper, as I did not know all that
much about the Victorian widowhood (which formed quite a substantial part of
this paper) so it was pretty stressful. Two weeks later I had to give another
paper at the LUCAS conference in Leiden entitled Death, the Cultural Meaning of the End of Life. This was the first
big international conference I was to give a paper at, so needless to say, I was
pretty nervous. Thankfully the paper for
this conference was very closely related to my Master thesis so I was quite
confident about what I wanted to say. Giving the papers (at both conferences)
went rather well, though the socializing aspect of conferences still scares me
a little. Shy as I am, I am just not good with big groups of people... Also it’s
really hard for me to push myself to strike up a conversation with someone I
have never met before... It’s like this hurdle I have to push myself to cross
every time. But I really do try my best, so hopefully it will get easier with
time! For those of you interested, this is the link to the LUCAS conference
website: http://www.hum.leiden.edu/lucas/lucasconference2013. You will be able to find both a short bibliography and the abstract of
my paper there under "speakers"! :D
Next to
those two conferences, I received word that I was partly responsible for
putting together the program for the graduate conference that was to be held at
the UvA on January 31 and February 1... I had to go through about 33 student
outlines after which I had to divide them into panels according to their
themes. MY GOODNESS that was a LOT of work. :) But I got in done in the end and
everyone was rather pleased with the result (they especially liked the titles
for the panels).
Next to all
this, I also had to completely rewrite my proposal for a funded PhD position
for the Institute of Culture and History.... Or well rewrite... Write it from
scratch would be a better way of saying it. The deadline for this was on
February 1. Finally, for next week I have another deadline. My teachers asked
me to provide a chapter outline + bibliography for my entire dissertation... I
am nearly done with that so at least I am on schedule.
And apart
from all this, I got the crazy idea to start a book club centering around
little known Victorian novels... Like I didn’t have enough to do already... I
have created a facebook page, a website and a preliminary booklist. We
currently have 12 members, of which 9-10 will be active members! :) I am currently
looking for a location (as I am writing this I am actually only waiting for the
final conformation so we are almost good to go!) :D. For those of you
interested this is our website: www.victitiousvlirtations.co.nr
o.o And
somehow I still managed to work 16 hours a week without collapsing... I was
getting pretty close though haha. And now I can actually say: THANK GOD JANUARY
IS OVER! :D I am currently enjoying my well deserved weekend in which I do
NOTHING research related! After this week though, I will be getting back to
researching. Though thankfully this month will be a lot less stressful. ^^ So I
hope to be able to get out some more blogposts.
Well, that’s
all for now. Thank you for reading! :D
Love,
Blacky
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3 comments:
. _ . holly cow girl, slow down lol. It's awesome that you got to do a lot of things though ^ - ^
^__^" I never want to have such a month EVER again haha. So I will be taking your advise and will be slowing down... So I can finally read your blog as well! :D
Looking forward to that :)
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