After a lot of time and effort, I have finally got my thesis proposal signed and accepted. Most of the extra time was devoted to answering the questions of the one professor who hasn't been making it to committee meetings, therefore he doesn't understand the material as well, so I did another revision of the proposal to try to satisfy his questions. After still more resistance, I got my thesis advisor to talk to him, and answer his concerns if he had any, and finally got him to sign off. A few days later, he says that he's going on sabbatical to Cambridge England for the next six months. He didn't bother bringing this up before! Anyway, he's admitted that's a good idea for him to step down from the committee so we can find another professor to replace him (he doesn't have to do this, he could just hold up the committee until July, so I'm grateful for small favors). Gotta find somebody fairly soon. I have a couple people in mind, but it'll have to wait till after the holidays.
Meanwhile, I keep doing experiments and writing them up, trying to make as much progress as possible. The primary bottleneck is my advisor's time, he's been very busy during the semester, and I have a queue of material for him to look at. So I try to write up the experiments in final thesis form, or as close to it as possible, to save the time of going back later for the writeup. This is a good strategy, and I'm making slow but steady progress.
I'm still hoping to be done by the end of April for graduation in June. This is a tight deadline at best, and may not be possible, but I'm going to keep shooting for it as long as I can. If I just miss it, I might still be able to go through commencement in June and get the actual diploma in September, which wouldn't be bad.
But the new bass (whom I wasn't crazy about to begin with) had a life crisis of some kind, and needed to take a leave of absence. We explained to him that it would be okay, after we were done with the concert series (since we couldn't really do it without him). He agreed to this, and assured us that he'd be there at Faneuil Hall. Called him at 3:30 pm the day of the show, he still says he'll be there. At 5:30 pm we're on, he's nowhere to be found. We limped through the show as best we could, but it was a pretty bad scene.
I don't think he had a particularly compelling explanation for this, and at this point I don't care. I'm not even really angry at him, any more than I'm angry at the rain for being wet, because I thought it was more or less inevitable that something like this would happen. I'm really angry at the rest of the group, for not seeing this coming, because I sure did, and they didn't listen when I tried to warn them. So now I feel dissed and resentful, and for the first time, very much like an outsider in this group.
In any case, we managed to get Jeremy (the group's original bass) to help out on the last few gigs of the season. He says that he misses us more than ever, and wants to rejoin for real. I think this would be fine, if he can really make the committment and stick to it. We're on break until after the new year, after that we shall see what happens.
Les Ballets Africains (the national dance company of Guinea) put on a show at Sanders Theatre which was very good. The first act was a presentation of coming-of-age rituals for Guinean girls, including the clitorectomy scene which has generated some controversy in the arts community among the "more politically correct than thou" types. I found it hard to watch (out of sympathy), but a Red Cross nurse arrives in the middle of the ceremony and stops it, which I thought was a nice touch. It does seem to me that this troupe, as a well established and well respected repository of African cultural heritage, is the right voice to be making commentary on this subject.
The Leonid meteors (17 November) were very disappointing after all the hype, just a couple of significant sightings, so that was kind of a burn.
This semester I have been enjoying some of the LSC movies at MIT, including The Phantom Menace, South Park, and Eyes Wide Shut. All very enjoyable, and the whole LSC experience is a blast of course. The high point was definitely the last-minute free sneak preview of "Being John Malkovich" which gets my vote for most surreal movie of the year. See it.
Happy apocalypse!
Wil