Freedom

It is done. Finito. Over. Complete.
Finally, I finished my dissertation. It took 4 months, 1360 articles, 17.000-odd words, hours of SPSS trial-and-error for 12 measly graphs and assistance from a variety of lovely people to churn out this devil spawn of an assignment. Thankfully, it has now safely been bound in a spiffy blue leather hard cover with silver lettering (after the hell I went through it better look pretty), and I am finally rid of it.
 And have, at the same time, turned my back on higher education. This has officially been my very last assignment for Uni ever, concluding a grand total of 6 years at various institutions. Now, it's time to make a foray into the real world. This is very strange for me, because I've only ever gone to school, and am unsure on how to do anything else. I do believe I deserve a bit of time off before I get seriously started on a career, but money doesn't grow on trees and we all have to eat, right?
Cue the start of the most epic jobhunt ever (likesrslyomg). To motivate myself, I shall keep a regular tally of applications/replies etc. on this blog so that you may all witness the rollercoaster I fear this endeavour will inevitably become. So, without further ado:

8 October
Applications sent: 4
Applications acknowledged: 2
Negative replies: 1
Positive replies: 0
(after 4 applications sent on 6 October)

Not bad for a first start, I should say. Well, we'll see how it goes. As one of our football greats always says: "If you never shoot, you'll always miss".

In other news: I finally finished reading Treasure Island, after a long dissertation-induced hiatus. It was enjoyable, but rather short. Sometimes I found my mind was drifting a bit, especially at the lengthy descriptions of Jim trekking through the jungle. Other than that there were no big moments of boredom, and I couldn't find any horrible plot holes. It was amusing to realise that all the pirates I've seen elsewhere (*cough* POTC *cough*) have been inspired by Stevenson's portrayal of Long John Silver. Who is actually quite an intriguing bastard of a character, I found. As this is a children's book, you can't really expect much deeper character development, and therefore I didn't find it particularly profound. But since that is not at all what it pretends to be, I'm not complaining; it's really entertaining when you just want a bit of light reading.
I realise that most of you will have read it ages ago, but in my country it's far lesser-known as a classic, and isn't considered a staple in every household. We had other icons, like Thea Beckman, Marc De Bel, Annie M.G. Schmidt and Tonke Dragt. None of whom will ring a bell with anyone outside my Dutch/Belgian audience. Still, I think there are translations of Thea Beckman's work out there; worth a read or a look. Not a fantastic movie, but it is an illustration of how big a name she is in Dutch children's literature.
Next time, the long-awaited review of Worm, and why it's great or not so great.

I'm rather tired today, so I'll leave you with this last announcement: NaNoWriMo starts in 23 days!! Time to flex your literary muscles and join in the writing madness this November. For the fifth year in a row I will attempt the challenge of writing 50.000 words of a story in one month; I succeeded in 2008 and 2010, and failed abysmally in 2009 and 2011. In keeping with the trend, it's time for another win this year! If this sounds interesting to you, let me know; we can cheer each other to the finish line.

Edit: Just noticed that the widget for my social media buttons comes with ads now... sorry about that. Anyone have a good alternative?