OK OK, so I was lying. I didn’t fix it in the dark. First of all, I took the wheel inside once I had removed it from the rest of the bike, and secondly, it’s still not fixed!

Well, it all started with me visiting a friend a few days back, who was so kind to give me his old mobile. See, I had not planned for another mobile and budgeting is a rather tight matter these days.
On my way back to the inner city, one of my bicycle tires went flat – luckily not before I was within crawling distance of my student house. However, also time is budgetted tightly right now, so I had to leave the bike there – locked, but unusable, and instead walk to the university every day. Now you might think that the 30/40 minutes walk each direction easily should match the amount of time spend on fixing the tire – but what you’re forgetting is that every day was planned from morning to evening, and there was no hole of a few hours that I could spend buying another tube, replacing the old one, and getting air from somewhere.

Today.

So it all had to wait until today, and I did manage to remove the tire, drag it on up to my floor, exchange the tube, walk around most of inner Oslo in search of a gas station (with the wheel in my hand) only to remember that I could ask the bike shop where I bought the tube, which is around the corner from my student house, and putting it back on. Now all that is missing seems to be some small 8but yet important) part that connects the wheel to the gear, and which probably fell off during my walking trip (grrh!).

And I did all this in the dark – the dark because that is what it is about all day here now. In fact, i have caught myself thinking:”oh no, it’s already dark, that means it must be time to go to bed and wait with doing anything further until tomorrow morning – at like 4 PM!

My waiting ended today because today was the day that I handed in my master thesis to the printing press for the second time. I gave t another front cover and I exchanged the abstract – for two reasons: on the one hand I did it in order not to get confused what version it is when I look at it, and on the other it is so it looks different from the book – which includes all of the thesis but also a whole lot more which, I think, only let it all make sense, cause you get the context of all the minor situations I am describing. (I have updated both the thesis and the book/extended-version that are linked from the top right continously, and they now hold all the changes hitherto.)

Anyways, my supervisor says its great – but he has been saying that for a very long time now. In fact he said that the entire time, so it does not assure me very much. And then – after turning my thesis over to the printing press of course – I started looking at what some others had turned in in the UiO digital library of master thesises (quite a lot are in English), as the guy at the intitute, who is in charge of handing out the slips for free printing of thesises showed all about that. First thing I did was go into Social Anthropology and browse a bit – but all that was lying out there seemed rather boring, so instead I seacrhed for “Marx*” in all subejcts, and up as number one came this one, by a former seminar leader of mine whom I respect quite a lot.

And all that looks so so academic compared to mine! I mean just by looking at the front pages, they all have this notice “this is blabla in partial fulfillment of the degree blabla” whereas mine just claims to be a “Master Thesis.” In inside it all seems so structured… almost as if you would have to change reality a bit to fit your model. OK, so that was mean, but it just seems like mine is so much more journalistic in spirit than many of these others. Now there is no more I can do I guess, and I know that it has been a lot of fun, I think I grew intellectually quite a bit and I certainly made some people in Douglas think. And what more can I expect? The grade does not make a lot of difference.

And now it’s 21:43, and I struggle with myself to stay awake, just so that I get back into a normal day rhythm one of these days…