What PhD feels like right now

While sitting here, preparing for my quantum finale and anticipating the relief I hopefully would feel once all my exams are over and my grades are up, I realized that this moment is but the fractal of my PhD journey so far, to the punctuation point.

Sitting in coffee shops where regulars have registered me by now, white noise of the comers and goers that have no coffee culture whatsoever, laptop turned on always and providing references and music, assignments and white paper nesting near a cup of coffee doomed to always be filled and emptied, over and over again, even when my hands start shacking and my heart beats too fast too oddly, my eyes aching from the pdf reading while my pocket is thankful for the spared 300 something dollar textbook that wouldn't have been enough anyway because right now it is an affair of at least three books per class, my food hastily gobbled up, the cheapest vegetarian thing I could get plus a little treat because that's how my life is right now: spending too much on outside vegetarian food and constantly buying myself treats to nurse the stress and the anxiety as best as I could do. And the whole thing while permuting between Shisho if I am feeling a teeny tiny hope or a little ember of energy

Or Vangelis, otherwise.

And I must admit between the two, it was Vangelis who frequently ruled over the sound space. This semester is under the hymn of Sweet Solitude and The Blue Monkey, they take the cup home these two.

I am taking a break, trying to decide if it's  grim or sad or melancholic or negative or normal to have this moment as a fractal. I haven't been able to read my own moods for few months now. And just when I surrendered to no longer looking for the why and how, I stumbled upon the response.

And man did it provide the how and why and made sense of plenty of things. I was listening to this in another coffee shop, working on another assignment from another class. I stopped and just listened to that thing on repeat, digesting the facts and letting them sink in. I have been more tranquil since then, more than I have been in some time, and it helped me with the final push I so needed to wrap up this infernal semester.

I mean this moment was fated to wrap up anyway, but to me, the matter of how I would come out of it was the main issue. I contemplate how I am coming out of it now and I am not satisfied, I'm not unhappy, I'm not frustrated either. I'm just existing, which is much better than whatever the hell I was doing before.

On another hand, while I spent my time mostly in coffee shops when I wasn't at work, I managed to go to the movies frequently, the most I have been in my whole life. I also attended every local performance of our classic local hall and every play in the region. Finally, I went through my mandatory marathons, namely Dune saga. Man how much I cried at work, before class, while donating plasma and while driving, over Leto II mainly, and the rest unevenly. It just never gets to a point where I am used to the books and the events. My understanding doesn't help with the emotional turmoil the books set in me.

I am getting tired already in this iHOP, and the waiter is not helping: Dude keeps bringing the coffee, and I keep drinking, he keeps refilling the cream bowl and I keep putting some in my mug. But it will all be over soon.

And then, I promise, I will go to a coffee shop and sit, and not do anything for the whole time while I am sitting. No book, no laptop, no phone, nothing.