It has been a long time since I have posted on my blog, and I do not regret it. Christmas break was the culprit. I spent about one week with mother. Actually, now that my thesis is almost over and it is clear that I should not head to Africa or some other far away land to complete it, I am feeling more relaxed about linguistics too. I still suspect that this subject spoiled my existence, and believe that the Ph.D. degree should not exist. But the fault is not just in the subject.

So why should the Ph.D. degree not exist? Because one should just learn by the day, not be forced to put his life on hold for five to sever years and work for free for a teacher who, in the best case, does not teach you anything new and in the worst case uses you as cheap labor. I learned a lot during my graduate Student years, but not enough to justify the complete wreck of my emotional life and my utter lack of success in building me a home or a family. Overall, the outcome is negative, years have gone by and I feel my choices have been woefully wrong.

First, my thesis turned out to be a piece of garbage. As I have already taken time to explain in this blog, adventure is usually a source of problems for researchers. I have experimented this only a few times during my trips to Paris, where I collaborated with a local university, and to North Africa. It was enough. Books are full of accounts of people who try to cross the jungle or rent a broken can and wreck in the desert, but research would be much easier to carry out and would take much less time without those obstacles. In general, a big audience to your seminar spells for trouble. I would not mind having had more people at my thesis defense than at my stupid African picture party at my place.

Second, I do not want to spend the rest of my life as a single, but at this point I think it is very likely that I will. You see, you can swing a boat just up to a certain point before it tips over. I feel I have emotionally tipped over. For that also I must thank my studies. It is simply not possible to put together a family while at the same time you are struggling with a one-thousand-euro income. Literally, for a Graduate Student it is always challenging to live a normal life. For what we do, I understand we get paid little. Our work is of no importance to the community, we use resources we do not contribute to create, and are oblivious of the implications of our work. Simply put, we are just an intellectual working class, devoid for that matter of any form of organization. I do not regret having been poor, only having wasted so much time to attain so little, but I am ashamed of how much it cost to do so.

Third, to get a little more personal, I do not think that studying really helps one to understand things better. Rather, it is a sort of parking place for those who do not have the guts to be in a real working environment, or just do not want to work. Generally, graduate students are among the worst, not the best students in their class. They're Lazy Asses who prefer to drag their butts around in a lab than doing real work. It does not matter if the typical grad student ends up working long hours and eating in his office seven days a week. He is forced to do so when he realizes that he will never get out of school otherwise. But he did not WANT to do it in the first place. He thought that his life would be EASIER as a student. In this Respect, a Ph.D. should know that the treatment he or she gets from employers is totally justified. They are substantially hypocritical when they say that employers treat them as lazy asses. Because they know they are. They tried to get away with doing nothing, hoping that the acronym after their names would entrust them with people's respect. But one has to gain respect through his actions, not a stupid title. And somebody who has WORKED for five to seven years rather than dragged his ass around TA-ing is worth substantially more respect. Everything gravitates around respect and accomplishment in life, and a Ph.D. does not provide either.

I hope I am wrong with my analysis, but something tells me that I am not. A back of the envelope calculation shows that, if you take a Ph.D. or an MS, you will never make up for the money you lost during those five or seven years. It is economics, stupid. It is just the power of compound interest. And that is only right, because laziness has a price, and it also has a cost for society. One should be ready to pay both of them.
Nonetheless, now that it is almost over, I am feeling better. I have not gotten up at three in the morning thinking about my life lately, and this is certainly a positive. I talk to myself sometimes: "you will eventually find a job", I say. But there is something abysmally pathetic in this. As a matter of fact, should I just focus on having sex at least once in three months before making plans for the future?
On a nicer note, the weather sucks here (this is in no way a news) and I this afternoon I will go to the sauna with some of my friends. Perhaps, naked in the steam, I will blow off my anger and become a better person.