我的论文是很大！

The thesis has been successfully defended, and I am now burried in the machinations of proofing the damned thing for the Faculty of Graduate Studies and getting it out the door. In fact, I got a small extension last week:

Good day Mr. LaRoche,

You have offered many and varied reasons in support of an extension. Unfortunately the vast majority of them are evidence of bad planning, more than genuinely extenuating circumstances. Having said this, if you can provide a clean thesis by the end of the working day on Monday, September 11, we will accept it.

Sometimes the truth hurts. Sometimes it can also get you a weekend's worth of time. Sometimes, when your extension is up, it turns out that you were never registered in your programme properly in the first place, so FGS can't even look at your thesis. This gives you a second extension, and a bill of $2,199 CAD when it is fixed.

* * *

Some of you have been asking, what's next? Well, I have been interviewed by the Library of Parliament in Ottawa for a defence policy analyst position, and I am waiting to hear back. The position sounds great (odd hours, lots of writing), and right up my alley policy-wise -- but we'll see. The competition out there is stiff as a salted cod, and I've been out of the defence world for a few months now because of the giant 200-page word document on my desktop.

In the meantime, I'm working one/two research jobs for John MacIntyre and Frank Harvey, the former of Figuratively Speaking fame (syndicated column that gets printed 10 million + times; I did the sixth stat down in the linked column, for example), the latter of Smoke and Mirrors fame. They're fun gigs, and I am enjoying slumming around Halifax with no money and little future.

(I am also taking a second-year Chinese class at St. Mary's to keep my mind nubile and work on my 中文／普通话, and perhaps get a future... translating Chinese or something... who knows).

This week I've been charged with writing the front-page editorial in the Dalhousie Gazette. It's nice to return to my old digs, though I've imposed strict standards on myself regarding word length this time, mostly because I no longer run the paper, so I can't write 1,500 words and get away with it. Or, at least, I can't do that without looking especially narcissistic. So we'll go with a flat 1,000 and see what comes up ;)

Finally, there is some word that my thesis may be published by the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies here in Halifax. I've got nothing other than that, but I'll keep y'all updated. Given that it's 180 pages + frontmatter @ 1.5 linespacing, though, I'm probably going to have to do one hell of an editing job on it first.

Zaht is Ahl.
再见。