Simon's World

I can’t believe I didn’t post anything for more than a year. Why did this year pass that fast? I’ve been up to a lot of stuff. We got another dog. Again a Hovawart, blond this time. She already is one year old now. So we have been pretty busy with this at the beginning of 2011. Then there has been work. We had to write research reports and prepare all the showcases which had to be handed in until the beginning of September 2011. After that I had an operation, just a minor one and it was well planned. And I have been struggeling a lot with my dissertation. In the first place I wanted to write about horror film iconography and intertextualities. Then I found another doctoral candidate in Graz who wrote on this. So I thought about a plan B – US-American Primetime Quality Drama. It turned out that I still could write about the horror flicks as that guy wrote from a literary criticism point-of-view. But I got stuck with the series/serials. That was around the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011. Thereafter I started to struggel whether writing a dissertation was the right choice. I made a decision just last week. I am writing my dissertation. I never made existential decisions makeing a pro-con list, I always made gut decisions. So here I am, a doctoral candidate, no matter what comes thereafter, no matter whether I might feel too old for this, no matter whether I will be a cash-out assistant or taxi driver afterwards. Thinking, re-thinking and (academic) writing is what I do best and what I love most. And I am back to my old self for whom the pursuit of happiness is what is most important.