Scrawled in Wax

Well folks, this should have happened about a month ago, but… Scrawled in Wax will stop updating for a while. I know, I know - you can barely read this for the tears suddenly streaming down your face. You wonder: What shall I do? How will I survive? Be strong, dear reader, be strong. But I can just see it now: as you reach the end of this post, you shall fall on all fours, gnashing your teeth in anguish, screaming up at the sky while striking the ground, demanding to know “why God, why?”, the hollow pit of despair building in your gut like a black hole…

Ahem. Sorry. Got a bit carried away there. Anyway - there is a good reason for what will likely be a five or six week absence. I say ‘likely’ because part of doing a PhD is one’s comprehensive exams and I have one coming up on May 1st and 2nd. If all goes well, the blog will be back with its verbose, poorly thought-out analysis of tech, pop culture and gaming in early May. If I fail, this blog will never update again because, having received final confirmation that I’m not cut out for this academic thing, I will have left to travel the world with a special troupe of circus acrobats who care more about describing somersaults than actually doing them.

If for some reason you care, my upcoming exam is on Literary Theory and Criticism - it involves lots of the major western theory on literature from Plato and Aristotle, through the Enlightenment and 18th century (Locke, Kant, Hegel etc.) onto Marxism and then a slew of 20th century schools like formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and, as if that weren’t enough, also feminism, postcolonialism and queer theory. Oh, for fun, there’s stuff like Heidegger and the Frankfurt school thrown in there as well. Naturally, if you know me personally or read this blog at all regularly, you know the point of this third paragraph was to elongate the phrase “I am fucked”.

If you feel like contributing something while I’m gone, then… I’ll be very very surprised. But when I get back, hopefully I can dust off this blog and make good on the modest growth it’s seen over the past few months (thanks mainly to a couple of links from Fimoculous). In the meantime, I’ll be probably be obsessively updating my Twitter and, if all gets too much for you, then remember: it’s navalang [at] gmail [dot] com.

We here at Scrawled in Wax appreciate your custom and look forward to serving you in the future… Heh. Seriously though, thanks for reading.

-Nav