Update on the update....

Well.... my so-called Honours Thesis is soon to be kaput. It has gone the way of the Edsol. In other words: I decided to drop it!



The decision came as the reality of completing a thesis for which I lacked a reasonable topic became less and less realistic, given a limited time frame of 2 months.



This is of course a gamble, which could have negative implications for my graduate school aspirations. However, I am banking on the fact that my transcript is otherwise quite strong and of course the alternative- actually completing the thesis- does not seem like a reasonable task, at least not if I want to have any remnants of my santé mentale in April.



This was a decision I made with great humility. I swallowed a great deal of pride in saying that I failed.... that I am incapable of completing this project. Of course, there were extraordinary circumstances which were beyond my control which, I believe, made this thesis a near-impossible task.



The more sobering implication of this decision is not wether it will prevent my admission into Grad school.... but does it reflect my lack of readiness for grad school? This is a daunting question for which I currently lack an answer. One on hand, school- especially this last year- has pretty much depressed me. I am sick and tired of reading overly theoretically and jargon-laden mumbo jumbo which authors have intentionally made excessively wordy and complicated for the sole purpose of establishing themselves as an élite class of intellectual academics. I'm also no longer looking forward to the task of having to create some brilliant project out of scratch- in other words, a thesis. Perhaps most of all, I'm not terribly fond of the life of limitless homework and readings, a life in which if I'm not actively reading something for school, I am sleeping, eating, or commuting between home and school.



Yet a part of me is still naïvely optimistic about grad school. If, as I hope, I get into NUS, it will be a complete change of environment which will hopefully eliminate some of the Canada-blues, caused primarily by the weather, but secondarily by the largely uninspiring food, people, and aesthetics. Secondly, the nature of grad school is fundamentally different to that of the undergraduate degree- no longer will I be a slave in 4-5 classes, and no longer will I have to fabricate some sort of thesis project for which I can't even do my own firsthand research. In fact, even for my Master's degree, I will be able to embark upon which is inevitably every first-year anthropology student'S pipe dream: ethnographic fieldword in an exotic locale, which, for me, means I might be able to return to Mae Sot, Thailand- a community to which I have great emotional attachments.



At the moment, grad school remains part of a distant, only possible future. For now, I have to overcome the rest of my semester, despite my unfortunate failure with the honours thesis, and finish my tenure at McGill with some dignity. It would help, of course, if I could overcome this seasonal depression...