I am dissertation procrastinating, so let's talk about my dissertation!

Heyyyyy guys, it's me! I know, I know, you've given me up for dead and you're all really sad but that's the way life is. BUT WAIT! It's a Wednesday night and I am in front of my computer, and even though we all know I should be doing work, I think we also know how unlikely that is, and so I'm going to write a stream of consciousness that will probably not really go anywhere but which totally counts as a contribution to the world and... Stuff. 

SO. The way my Masters has worked (apart from taking up every moment of my spare time, thank you very much Shakespeare, it's a good job I like you) is that we submitted two essays after Christmas, two after Easter, and then have about three and a half months to write our dissertations. About a month and a week of that time has gone, and I'm not panicking... At all... Really... 

Well. I'm not really panicking, but I am totally aware that I need to do a lot more than I've done. June has been a total write off, essentially- not only have I been operating under griefhaze (TM) but I had already over-scheduled myself to the point of having all my weekends taken up, and quite a few of the weekdays I have off too. Because I'm a dumbass. Anyway, the moral of this story is, July and August I'm going to have to be ON IT, otherwise when am I even going to write a dissertation?! Exactly.

But anyway. This is really just me complaining when ACTUALLY I want to describe my dissertation to you because I'm pretty pleased with what I'm getting away with in regard to it. Basically, I'm writing my dissertation on Shakespeare in cartoons. What this has so far meant is that I've spent a pretty huge amount of time watching anime, South Park, and reading The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman (There are two comics which relate to Shakespeare, but OBVIOUSLY I have to read the whole thing so that I can catch the other references to him too!) Just today, I've started Kill Shakespeare, which is another comic book series starring many Shakespearean characters, and it is EXCELLENT and I'm pretty much enjoying all these fun parts.

To get more specific: I'm looking at three plays (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet) and then cartoons that relate to them (Titus Andronicus has the LEAST cartoons about it, BUT the South Park episode I want to talk about is basically Titus so that clearly has to be one of the plays I talk about!) and then kind of discussing the aspects of the plays that the cartoons bring out that may not be readily apparent just on a simple reading of the plays. I think. Kind of. Because, and I think most of you probably know this because we seem to be a very educated bunch, when you start writing such a giant piece of work, things are subject to change and you can be taken in different directions than initially anticipated. But, I'm pretty excited about my research so far (such as it is) and I'm really excited to read more comics. 

So. This is kind of what I'm going to be up to from now until 7th September! I'm writing this not only as procrastination but because I remembered the other day that I'd written a 26 before 27 list, on which I said I was going to blog twice a week aaaand that hasn't happened. But I want it to! And it's fully achievable! So this is happening and GOD will I need a break from all the cartooning. Mwahahaha I still feel like I'm getting away with something here...