Jung and easily freudened

Lingering over tea and marmite-tinted toast this morning, after hosing my scorched throat with pint after pint of blissful water, I got on to the subjects of doctorates as ordeals. Exams are the rituals that mark our lives, the rights of passage that lead us into adulthood - which is why continuous assessment is for wimps - and doctorates take this to a whole new level. Their function, I opined in a manner which seemed less pompous at the time than it does on reflection, is to grind us down, to flatten us out, to smash us into smithereens so we can pick ourselves up and turn ourselves into new people.

And this ordeal, I said, has all its own rituals. Like supervision.

You know how it works. You appear, embarrassed and ashamed, knock, and shuffle in, greeting your supervisor, and mumbling an apology for not seeing him in however long.

Well, don't worry about, he'll say. You're here now. So. What have you been doing?

And then you'll hang your head, feeling worse than ever, and talk about all the things you'd meant to do, but didn't. The things you tried and gave up, the things you just couldn't cope with, and all the trivial distractions you found so you could avoid doing the very thing that you're here for. You're crap, you're thinking. You're utterly worthless. He must hate you.

And then, after a silence, he'll smile and say, well, that's not quite as bad as it sounds. There are some bits of good in there, and you meant well, at least sometimes. And anyway, this is a chance to make a fresh start. How about you try this, and do this as well, and really, you must avoid that. I know, it's tempting, but it does you no good. But this could be good. You've got the potential to do this, after all. You wouldn't be here otherwise. It'll be okay.

Oh, and one last thing, here's something you should do now. In the library. Now.

And you walk out, and the sun is shining, and the birds are singing, and you want to join them. All is right with the world.

And on the way to the library you think, oh, the others are in the pub, they'll want to know how it went.

And the cycle begins anew.

Supervision as the academic sacrament of reconciliation. I can't wait to tell my supervisor. And my priest.

Honour is like the hawk: Sometimes it must go hooded.

Yes, I'm back, though this time I'm wearing a disguise. It makes sense, after all, especially on this most cloak-and-dagger of days.

Why blog again?

Well, I'd never wanted to stop with my old blog, in which I'd invested far too much of myself over the years, but having my erstwhile boss spend hours on it day in day out in a desperate and deranged quest for dirt to damage me with rather removed its charm. Not that that would have made me stop, especially since there was nothing there I wouldn't have happily seen published in a more traditional medium, but it did rather take the fun out of things. So I struggled on without enthusiasm, until Spring, when I decided that having so many of my thoughts available to the world at last probably wouldn't help me when I left my academic cage in search of gainful employment.

So I entered some code so that it would slip under the radar of pretty much every search engine, and I had it wiped from the caches of Google and Yahoo, and then, eventually, I made it invitation only. But with only four or five readers a day, well, it just hasn't seemed worth the effort, and has been dying a slow death over the last few months.

And that may be for the best.

I've been missing blogging, for all sorts of reasons, and I've been thinking a while of stepping back into the waters. Hence this. Look, I know I'm not fooling anyone. The Thirsty Gargoyle is a fairly transparent bit of wordplay, after all, and if you know who I am to start with then the whole disguise is kind of redundant.

But even so. My name will not be here, and I'll be doing my damnedest to blur a few other issues.

I'm going to try to post every day, but whether I do or not, I'll have one simple rule.

It's a wordlimit. 500 a day. That's the deal. If I go over it, I'm not going to waste time editing it down to 500, but I'm going to pretty much make sure 500 is my limit. That way I can happily babble online, but not waste any time in doing so. 500 is nothing, after all.

In case you're wondering, by the way, this post's title is from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' magnificent Watchmen. It's a book I've been thinking of a lot lately, especially in terms of its Juvenalian tagline, and that fine Nietzschean quote at the end of chapter six:

Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster,
and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

There are times when I worry. Like tonight. The term 'sting' has been used.

But it seems to me that a leap of faith is needed. The tide can yet be turned.

Wish me luck.

Before I Begin: A Disclaimer

The point being: don't take this too seriously. I've no plans to do so, after all. Some of it will be completely made up.

If you have serious issues with anything, and don't want to leave a comment, you can always e-mail me: the 'Contact Me!' box should work for the likes of Outlook, but just doing a mouseover will enable you to see my address. If I get any facts wrong, or anything like that, please do let me know. Even Homer nods, as they say.

Comments are more than welcome, of course, so please, get stuck in. Nothing nasty, of course: I've had problems with that sort of thing in the past!

Update

There have been a few people since I've started this blog who've somehow read this disclaimer as meaning that nothing here is to be taken at face value, and that it's never meant seriously. That wasn't quite what I was going for when I originally wrote this, and obviously the blog has grown since then anyway.

Use your judgement: it should be pretty obvious when I'm talking about something with my serious hat on.

And on comments...

On comments, as of today -- 23 December 2011 -- I've decided that I'm not going to post any purely anonymous comments. Please, if you're commenting at least give some kind of a name or handle to prevent threads from getting complicated. I'd rather people use their real names, of course, as that's always best, but I understand that that's sometimes impractical.

Disagreement is fine. Intelligent and informed disagreement is better; genuine engagement is always good, and I like smart people who disagree with me in a smart way.

Clear irrelevance, uncharitable pedantry, and abuse, on the other hand, probably won't make it to the page.