Goodbye, MA!

On the 12th of September, 2008, I finally handed in my postgraduate thesis. In the end, I loved it. I'm not convinced that anyone else will love it; but I did.

My title was "Realism and Fantasy in Homeric Descriptions of Warfare." I worked through five chapters, focusing on issues of Wounding and Death, Arms and Armour, Poetic Techniques, Battle Frenzies and the Role of the Gods. I had to limit it to a maximum of 15,000 words, with an intended goal of 10,000 words.

I wrote 15,600. I'm yet to see if I'll be penalised for that. You might think that I'd be able to cut out six hundred words just by changing my language a little bit. You're probably right; I probably could have. I didn't want to. I love my style of writing. I write the way that I want to read, and I couldn't just ignore that in something so important as a two-year MA thesis.

So it's done. I'm pleased with the end result. I think it reads wonderfully. I do, in fact, know that there are lots of mistakes. That is, typing errors. Occasions I have let my word processing program change my spelling to American and not caught it in the act. This is due to the fact that I was so familiar with what I had written by the end of it that I just read what I meant to read, rather than what was there. I could have used an editor.


Unfortunately, I don't think that it's a master-piece. But it wasn't written to be one. Some time before I actually put words down following my masses of research, I realised two things. One: this was never going to be an important thesis. It won't be published, even if it's fantastic. The analysis of Homeric Mycenaean culture is no longer a la mode, and it never has been throughout my tenure in academia. But still, it is what interests me, and what sets the fires of intrigue within me. Had I been a scholar fifty years ago in the time of Lorimer and Snodgrass, I would have made a killing.


Secondly: no matter how excellently I wrote my dissertation, my MA grade was going to be hampered by my performance over the past two years. As I understand it, there're two passing grades. That is, the passing grade, and the passing with a distinction grade. And then there's failing. I highly doubt that I could have failed, unless I have somehow plagiarised without knowing it and must be disqualified that way. In order to pass with distinction, one must meet two criteria: a certain mark in all modules, and a certain mark with the dissertation. If I scored 99/100 with my dissertation, I could still only make the passing grade for my MA, as my modules have not all met a high enough mark. And there's only one that hasn't, as far as I'm aware. CRMR - Classical Research Methods and Resources. The exam I took while I was miscarriaging.

So when I put the metaphorical pen to paper, I bore this in mind. My dissertation is not and was never meant to be breath-takingly important to Classical Scholarship. It is the work of a girl who struggled through her Masters and came to hate academia with the same kind of passion that she once loved it. I'm tempted to say that I wish I had never read my Master of Arts, and that I had just stuck with loving scholarship after my BA, and wishing always that I had done it. Rather than regret that I had wasted two years with it.

I don't wish that. Give me some time, and I will look back on my Masters and forget the disgusting workload, the pressure, the need to strive to be good enough; and never being good enough. I'm sure in a year or so I will be grateful for the extra two years of studentdom.

The Board of Examiners for the University of Durham's Classics and Ancient History Department met on Wednesday, 22nd of October, 2008. My mark has been decided. They know, and I don't. I'm assuming that I have made the passing grade. I'm not considering that I haven't. It's possible, but Johannes saw draft upon draft of my dissertation, and if it was that bad, he would have said.

I am set to graduate at 2pm on Friday, 16th of January, 2009. I don't get to wear a mortar board this time: that depresses me.

So... goodbye, MA. I don't miss you.

Fingers in pies.

So like I said yesterday, I have my fingers in a few pies. The biggest and most important is that I've been working at the Discovery -teque for about two months now, and I'm enjoying it. I'm working Front of House, which means that I'm one of the girls with the radio on her hip, and that I discreetly watch you for your whole day in my museum, and leap to it if you annoy me and I want you out.

It's fun. I enjoy it. To begin with, my feet hurt so bad after every 8.30-5.10 shift that I had to spend a good half an hour rubbing them when I got home each evening or they would still be sore when I went to work the next day. I hate having pressure-sore feet. It's horrid. Nothing makes time pass more slowly, and nowhere in the world can time move more slowly than in a quiet museum.

The people I work with amuse me lots. There's one girl in particular that I've made a bond with, and when we're both in a shift together, we spend the whole day winding each other up. [I'm at this point here, right now, where I'm trying to decide whether I ought to disguise my life, even though there is only the one person reading this blog. There is the possibility that other people may, so perhaps I should.] Anyway, this girl, she makes me laugh. We get on really well. We started at the Disco at the same time, and we just linked to each other quickly. There were four girls that started at the same time: me, Prancer (that would be the girl that I prance around the museum with -- see what I did there?), Gossip-girl and Curator-girl. These nicknames amuse me. They're very apt.

I'm coming around to Gossip-girl eventually, although she alienated herself to me to begin with. She is a gossip, you see. I have no time for gossips. (That's not to say that I'm not one. I am. But this is private. Ish.) She never gossiped about me, but she did about my friend Prancer, and that just put me off her. Still, I spent a couple of days with her last week the way that I spend my shifts with Prancer, and I kind of saw that she's not as cocky as she appears to be. The reason why she's "Yes, sir, no sir," with the seniors is not particularly because she's wanting to please, but because she's nervous. Still -- I'm wary around her. I'm conscious of what I'm saying all of the time and that she might repeat it.

Curator-girl had a few shifts and then stopped. She got a temporary position as a Curatorial Assistant. So for two months, the other three of us have been working together with the whole team, getting to know them, letting them get to know us, and she has been "upstairs" in the offices. There's a very real divide between Them and Us in the museum, and it's depressing. I enjoy what I do, but I don't want to be Front of House my whole life. This is supposed to be a temporary gig that is my way into Museum Services. The snobbery is pretty much only one sided: Front of House staff don't tend to think anything bad about Office Staff, at least individually, until they do something or say something unfair. For example -- last Tuesday, I worked late covering a gallery opening. Some woman asked for help disposing of the leftover food and drink. She had already put it into bags, but needed access to the basement, which only Front of House staff has, because she didn't want to leave it for one of us to take down in the morning.

This sounds like a nice thing, right? She wanted to save us hassle, and to stop the food from smelling overnight. Well, I took her down to the basement. I carried half of the bags. I opened the doors. I went into the bin room and put up with the smell and slung her bags in for her. When we were going back up to the public areas, I saw a trail of orange goo. After a few steps I bent down and poked at it and went "oh, it's still wet." At that point she thought it good to tell me that her bag had been trailing it since we left Turbinia. Her tone indicated that she knew it all along. She was very "*shrugs* Someone else will clean it up!" about it.

Stupid woman. That someone else is me. She pranced off and got to go home, and I had to stay back another twenty minutes -- keeping the whole Front of House team another twenty minutes -- mopping up a trail of sweet chilli sauce that led from the middle of the museum, past two lifts, through TWM reception - staining the carpet - down some stairs, and onto the newly painted basement floor.

...that is the kind of attitude that annoys Front of House staff. She could have told me that the bag was leaking as soon as she noticed, and I could have put another bag around it. Or she could have put the lid on the damned pot of sauce before throwing it in the bag in the first place. I'm constantly taking phone calls from Office Staff asking me to come and get a parcel from their office and take it down to be picked up. They get snarky when I, usually politely, explain that it's not my job to be their courier. I take parcels up to them when they arrive, because they look messy if they're just left at Reception. If there was somewhere tidy to keep them, I wouldn't bother. I do not run around after them, doing all of the things that they can't be bothered with. Don't get me wrong; I'm sure that they're busy too. But they could be polite and say "When you have a moment, would you mind popping up and getting this parcel for me?" They'd have a far better chance with that kind of attitude than "I have four parcels in ___ office. You'll need a trolley." It's those people that get the "I'm sorry, I'm Front of House staff. I need to stay Front of House. If you'd like a parcel taking to the Transit Door, I suggest escorting it to the lift, and then escorting it out of it again *hangs up*" answers.

That was quite a rant, but my opinions aside, there isn't much scorn from the Front of House side to the Office side, it's generally the other way around. Apparently, once you're Front of House, it's hard to climb up into anything else. ....so, that's just what I wanted to hear.

Curator-girl is apparently coming back to our team. That'll be good, because although she did appear a little bit snobby with her "I'm not here to make friends!" (she actually said that) attitude, she was nice enough. She's going to be behind, though. She's going to annoy the seasoned Front of House staff with her questions. She's going to annoy me with them.

So out of the four of us, I think I'm the most settled in. I just kind of get on it with. Prancer is a darling, but she floats through her shifts without doing any real work. She'll do something if she's asked to, but won't just go and do it. Gossip-girl isn't liked by a few people and is dismissed as a gossip and/or brown-noser by the rest. Curator-girl hasn't been around enough to be settled in. I'm very sure that there are opinions made about me, too, but if any of them are negative, I'm yet to hear them.

I will, of course, be crushed when I do.

Waffle.

It's been quite a while since I've posted. I suppose that I was always bad at keeping journals, long term. There was a period when I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, when I would write in an online journal that I shan't link from here (because I'm very glad to forget it) almost daily. I suppose that after that, I actually got myself a life and no longer had time for it.

Obviously that's not strictly the truth. I still have no life and I'm just talking nonsense to make myself feel better about not posting. The blessing of being able to bullshit yourself.

Things are good on my side of the internet. I have my finger in a few pies and things are starting to take shape. It seems as though my carefully constructed façade of happiness, which has taken me years upon years to create, may actually be turning into happiness.

We'll see.