The Scientist

With the first proper feeling of having really acheived something since the start of this long and sometimes tortuous route through the ins and outs of political economy, the moment has finally arrived where I can call myself something new: I'm officially a scientist.

When I say officially I am, of course, referring to a decision made by the governing body of my own body and self, myself: I have written and sent to the relevant professor a scientific paper in which a new and previously undiscussed theory is outlined, data found for the proof or otherwise of said theory and analyses are made on said data the results of which are presented in serious-looking tables in black and white with enormous margins, double-spaced type and a small number at the bottom of every page, preventing the bewildered and overwhelmed reader from losing his very sense of self and location as he gazes in barely credulous fascination at the argument laid out in words of greater than one syllable in incontrovertable font-with-serif seriousness before him on the leather bound pages.

Ok, I may be exaggerating somewhat for dramatic effect, but the point still stands. I've written a paper. It's not an essay, nor is it a project. It's neither a worksheet nor a take-home test. It's a paper and I know this because it starts with an abstract not an introduction. This is how I know I'm now officially a scientist.

Today, in the style of a Roman emperor, I have lain on the sofa reading a book and drunk two coffees in my tracksuit bottoms, with ne'er a thought that I should have a shower or deal with the serious issues of the day. It's the first time I've been rid of that horrible student sense of having something very important to do which hangs over every moment of unending free time, spoiling the mood but not quite being forceful enough to convince you to leave the lilo in favour of the library. And it feels good. I'm geniunely very relaxed.

Inspired by a book I have been reading in which it is mentioned that an English woman learns French via the Langenscheidt method - by which one learns by heart a minimum of 30 pages of a foreign text - to learn a German poem by heart. It's the kind of thing that, caught in the struggle for higher position (J. Mitchell's words), it's easy to forget to do. Since I was a wee teenager I've wanted to be able to recite at least the first few pages of STC's 'Ryme of the Ancient Mariner' but just kind of assumed that you either can do that sort of thing and hurrah for you, or you can't and so must it ever be. It never occured to me that if you want to be able to do something like that, one option is to just sit down and learnt how to do it; it's just always seemed to somehow take a back seat to the driving desire to write CVs and get a job sitting at a computer all day. I'm sure that by tomorrow this feeling will have left me and I'll once again throw the poetry book into the corner in favour of Facebook and job applications, but today, just for a day, I'm going to use my hours in the service of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and I will do so today for as long as my consitution allows...