I finally got up off my lazy butt yesterday and forced myself to go to the supermarket and get some cleaning done, and today at work I worked a bit on the conclusion for my thesis, which is about halfway finished (the conclusion that is, the main text of the thesis is mostly done, save for a bit of revising and polishing up) ... it always seems, however, that the last little bit is the hardest to write, and although I know what I want to say, and even though it's mostly just re-hashing the main points of my thesis, I just can't seem to force myself to sit down and write it out at one sitting ... which I could do if I really wanted to. On the bright side (or maybe not-so-bright-side), I think I've read pretty much all of the good gay stories online now, so there's really nothing to keep me occupied except for my thesis and starting to prepare for my Ph.D. entrance exam (I swear I'll start preparing one of these days ... my goal is to at least get started by the middle of February ... we'll see if I can actually stick to that). However, being the lazy procrastinator that I am, I'm sure I'll find something else to keep me occupied besides what I should be doing. :wacko:

On a positive note, yesterday I received an invitation to critique a paper on "Li Yu's Garden Life and Eremitic Thought" at an academic conference at the end of this month ... it kind of surprised me that they asked me, a foreigner, to critique a Taiwanese grad student's paper ... I didn't even know that I qualified as an "expert" on Li Yu (a writer/philosopher from the Ming/Qing dynasty period, very well known for his plays and novels), although I did publish a paper on a couple of his homoerotic short stories about a year and a half ago. It should be interesting, though ...

So, now, I just REALLY need to get myself together and finish this goddamn thesis ... I've been working on it for like 1 1/2 years now ... if I actually get into the Ph.D. program, I don't know how I'm going to actually write my dissertation ... writing a M.A. thesis is hard enough ... and I keep getting distracted by these damn stories ... **sigh** I guess it's my way of living the kind of romantic life I wish I had vicariously through the characters ... pretty pathetic, huh?