Ah, 3 months on, no proposal and still I (I’m sorry, I know I get carried away with the brackets. But after I used the word ‘I’ there, MS Word tried to pull me up for ‘use of first person’. What? Obviously detective novels are written with some other program.) decide to write web entries rather than thesis. Arrgghh. The trouble I think I am having with thesis writing is that the short bursts of time you think you can procrastinate for when writing essays for example, a couple of weeks or a few days at a time, have been superseded by one enormous deadline in the distant future. Thus the time available for procrastination seems to extend into and beyond the horizon, taking me through, if my calculations are correct, to about the year 2008. Of course, my rational brain knows this is not the case, but I persist as if I can write the whole thing overnight if necessary. The other problem is my lack of motivation. Doing a thesis because A: you can and B: you can think of nothing better to do by the time March rolls around is perhaps not the best frame of mind to enter into things with. At this stage, I think my best and most realistic chance is that some kind of sense of self-preservation will kick in. At least I’m feeling increasingly anxious about my lack of proposal (save 357 words of introduction) and I have actually travelled to the university, even if I’m not working. Maybe tonight I shall come back and go writing mad.

This morning I was having a dream about maths, and being in maths class. I hate maths – it’s far too precise a science altogether, so I’m not sure what the dream was trying to tell me. At any rate in it my teacher wrote the number ‘2’ on the board and asked us to ‘define’ it. We all said it was 4 divided by two, but he said no, haha, because 4 is 2 times 2 and if we couldn’t define 2 then how could we define 4? It turned out that what he was getting at was that you aren’t able to be sure of anything in the universe until you can prove that 1 is 1, (and 1 is of course what 2 is 2 of, which was his original point) and then he launched into a lengthy formula to this purpose that continued across the whiteboard several times, so that he had to erase the left-hand side to continue from the right, and of course I had been too slow copying the thing down, and was so left sitting there staring into space while the teacher droned on in that Charlie Brown (fwah fwaaaaaaah, fwa fwa fwa fwaaah) way, wondering what on earth I had taken maths for. (This was an experience very typical of my high school maths career.)

When I awoke from this dream I was even more convinced than I was before that maths for the sake of maths is indeed (with apologies to a couple of James, a Tim McLennan and a Leland) a science that has disappeared up its own arse. Practical maths, yup, good, make the world go round, it gets lent to economics and engineering and physics and chemistry (to my own immense personal disappointment in 6th form chemistry class, when we stopped throwing stuff into other stuff to see what colour it would go, and started doing equations instead) and whatever else, and I’m all for it, in a sewer maintenance kind of way – I know we need it, just so long as I’ve got nothing to do with it. But what is with, for example: imaginary numbers? How can you in fact imagine a number that isn’t a previously existing non-imaginary one – is that not why we have infinity? And even if you can, why bother? I can imagine an incredibly tiny race of 6-limbed orange people named the Foonfoon, that have, over the years that seem like aeons to them, created a rich and thriving culture inside our vacuum cleaner bag - but do I propose that the academic community makes them a subject of serious scientific inquiry? No I do not. For that would surely make me an insane person.
No doubt mathematicians everywhere will leap to inform me how without higher maths the earth would fall off its axis and we would all have to wear our shoes on our ears, but I say: phooey, or perhaps, to use a more classic literary expression, bah humbug.

As this entry is now, depressingly, twice as long as my thesis proposal, it may be time to draw to a close, as others have already recorded the last 3 days of rugby, drinking, hangover, and taking a beating at the hands of the pixellated soccer stars of Bulgaria, in that order. I will finish by telling everyone that I have concluded that the film critic in the Listener, Phillip Matthews, is a bit of a dick. He gave an unfavourable review to ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ (which I think polled at number 4 or 5, somewhere in the all-time top ten anyway, of best movies ever in the Empire Australia readers poll) doesn’t like Star Wars much at all (he labelled Episode 2 and Star Wars in general ‘increasingly irrelevant’ – which hardly seems to fit with its continuing mass appeal, or the fact that 53,000 people in the N.Z census listed their religion as ‘Jedi’), found ‘Silence of the Lambs’ one of the most overrated films ever, (actually maybe I agree to an extent there) and said this week that Adam Sandler was ‘crass’ and had ‘no talent’ – agreed, all his recent films apart from maybe ‘The Wedding Singer’ are almost total crap, but what about ‘Billy Madison’ and ‘Happy Gilmore’ – and crass? Perhaps, but then YOU, Phillip Matthews, have named ‘Dumb and Dumber’ and ‘There’s Something About Mary’ as two of the ‘greatest comedies of the nineties’. Contradictory? Hell yes. I mean I’m all for having your own opinion, but he just seems to set out to shoot down popular movies to prove his superiority, Cultural snobbery and elitism, arrgghhh. Popular does not equate to bad.And he uses the same jokes over and over again. Oh well, at least he recommended ‘Broken Arrow.’

All this has led me to think that maybe this site needs something along the lines of whatsbetter.com except for movies – much like the IMDB has, only with people I know. TBALC’s top 10 films or something. Hmmmm. Ruminate ruminate.

Anyway, it’s 5:40. This afternoon’s off-putting has been successfully accomplished.
Home it is.