Intermezzo I: Alice in Academia

The tale that follows is neither fact nor fiction, it is an ode to my adventures through academia. Everyone has had an Alice in Wonderland moment, come walk with me and mine for a while ….

Alice felt dishevelled, the feeling started from her toes and steadily travelled up until she felt her mind trying to work in a vat of hardening amber. Despite the sensation of a long, difficult day it had, in many ways, been quite unremarkable. She had been camped out in front of her desk for what felt like eternity, a purgatory of Mondays melting into Sundays, weeks seeping into months. When daylight cast its shadows across the white breeze-blocked building, she would saunter the corridors to flaunt her accumulation of time (mis)spent skulking in the office. But internally there danced a slow lament, a score of idleness, productivity gone begging. Alice was troubled by the dissonance between the different rhythms she felt gently tugging at her. An internal cadence; the slow fermenting of ideas, languishing with uncertainty, and the external pressures; the rhetoric of production and efficacy, the rat race and the expectation.