12 days. i wish i had a t-shirt i could walk around in that says this is graduate school. you know, there are exaggerations, and jokes (thank you, minz, and other people, for thinking of me), and false bravado, but there's no honest way of disguising the fact that this is hell. i wake up, i drink 2 cups of coffee, i don't even really stop for lunch (food just seems to happen, somehow -- i'm not dead, so clearly nutrition must be coming from somewhere), and the rest of the time i'm just submerged in this thesis, or studying for my statistics finals, or being bombarded with e-mail. the weekend was fantastic, admittedly, but i'm 48 hours into the week, and it was only a couple of hours ago i realised it was tuesday. and when i go to bed, in the early hours of the morning, i dream of microsoft excel.