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Originally Posted by livius drusus
Hi Michael!  How's the dissertation going? |
Hello yourself!
Slowly, alas, but my advisor should be back sometime next week, and if all goes well, we'll have the (more or less) final version completed next week and send it out to the rest of my committee for review. Figure about 2 weeks to let them look it over and make any suggestions, and then I'll defend. With luck, I'll be officially done by mid- to late-September.
At this point, I'm
more than ready to be done!
Sadly, there have been a few . . . complications . . . in my life over the past couple of months, which have kept me kinda busy, so let's just say that I'm anticipating being
much happier this time next year! By then, I'll hopefully have a good job and financial stability, be able to get more than a few hours' sleep a night, catch up on some long-neglected duties -- like hiking and camping, reading good books, writing, etc., etc. (Yay!)
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That's beautiful.  Did you answer something pithy about having just gassed up your horse and buggy?
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Considering we were literally only a few miles from Grandfather Mountain, where the Highland Games are a
major event and are held
every year, it was astonishing to me that he apparently hadn't seen
lots of guys going around in kilts before he encountered me. (Of course, he might have just moved there from somewhere else.) Even more astonishing, of course, was that he apparently didn't know what a kilt
was and what sorts of people tend to wear them.
I was kinda pleased that I managed to keep a perfectly straight face and that I neither laughed out loud nor blurted out the comment that leaped to mind about how the Amish are not known either for wearing kilts or for driving automobiles. Instead, I politely informed him that I wasn't Amish at all, that I was there for the Highland Games, and that I was wearing a "kilt" -- traditional
Scottish Highlands dress. He seemed to find that information quite interesting.
It was definitely kind of a
Twilight Zone moment to be sure.
Still, it's not the first time that I've walked into a store in rural North Carolina while wearing a kilt. I've gotten stares, of course, but I've never been laughed at or challenged. This has lead me to formulate Michael's Law #7: "So long as you look confident and self-assurred, few people will dare to challenge your right to do
anything." (It may help, as some of my companions have pointed out, that I apparently can look sort of intimidating. I find that vastly amusing, for some reason, since I'm just-about the least aggressive person who ever lived.)
Cheers,
Michael