How to write a BA thesis after 6 years of being a fuck-up
-You pick a topic, have it approved, make a writing plan. You feel relieved that the people in your group have topics far less solid, and you gain faith in yourself when someone says his biggest downfall is that he is too profound. Now you conquered one of your biggest fears; beginning.
-You pick a topic that many, many people have already written about. You don’t think that that means you won’t have anything to add because you know now that that isn’t your job. You are not a career academic. You pick your favourite book by your favourite author, and apply some extremely obvious theories to it. You don’t try to reinvent the wheel, and you don’t pick books that seem cool but that you haven’t read yet. They could only disappoint.
-You write down everything you already know you want to say. You write it in academic language so you can use it in the finished product. You are very afraid of the blank page, the sooner you fill it the better. You don’t sit down to read background sources cover to cover, you just flick through the chapters and look in the index for terms that seem familiar. You hope everyone else does it this way too.
-You calculate how much you still need to write and cut it up into the smallest possible pieces of writing. You make a To Do list of all these tiny fragments. They say things like ‘100 more words on Dorian Gray’s ambiguously gendered interests’ and ’50 more words on Sybil’s suicide’. You subtract every extra word you wrote from the amount you will have to write in the conclusion. You hate conclusions. You tick every tiny thing of the To Do list immediately after doing it. It feels very rewarding.
-You use the Pomodoro method like it is a religion. 25 minutes of working followed by a 5 minute break, with a 15 minute break after 4 cycles. It is the only way to make your horrible brain focus on completing something when it is used to endless immediate gratification from the apps  on your phone. You get up in the breaks to make yourself loose-leaf tea.
-You come close to finishing, so you get cocky and take days off to drink lattes in town. You regain your spirit and power through. You work for two horribly boring last days and then you have what is essentially a thesis. It isn’t perfect so you edit and change. You find it  much easier to polish an imperfect piece of writing than to write it from scratch.
-You finished. You haven’t handed it in yet, so you could still die before the deadline. You would at least die a person who finished something she started for the very first time.
I also finished a hat I was making for my girlfriend that I can now give her as a birthday present. I left it out on the table and she found it but at least now I know it fits.
Fashion:
I did some proper spring cleaning on my wardrobe! I got rid of loads of clothes that had become a bit ratty and put away winter clothes, and I folded loads of things that were hanging so now the hanging part of my closet is genuinely accessible! I’m excited to wear summer clothes again. Last summer I feel like I wore a lot of frumpy stuff because it was so hot and I didn’t know how to keep cool and comfortable. I have some super cute stuff now though so I’m all ready for it to get warm.
I wore a couple of pretty cute outfits this week though, like this situation featuring my new ASOS mom jeans so there’s that.
Food:
I baked my ‘famous’ lemon poppyseed cake for my friend Isabel’s surprise birthday dinner. It was delicious as always! I made a little zine called Yellow with the recipe for it like a year ago that I should maybe scan and upload.
I also ate something from my moestuintjes! Ok, it was like 5 tiny bits of cress but I grew them and ate them and they tasted good. The moestuintjes are doing really well, I repotted several of them and there’s a few more that I should really do this weekend. It’s already going a lot better than last year so I’m optimistic.
Blogging:
I was having some beers with my friend Lisa yesterday and she told me that I should really get on starting an actual professional blog, which I have talked about doing for years and years but never actually put the effort into and I do think it is time I did that. This is just meant as a place to write down whatever I’m thinking about but I think it would be really fun to do it properly. I really want to do a kind of lifestyle blog about fashion, food, home stuff etc and I think I would be pretty good at it. I just have to you know, actually do it. I think a Blogger or Wordpress blog is the way to go, but more on this later.
 Last but not least, Lola had her birthday! She is four years old now, but it was her first birthday with us. We bought her some toys and a new water bowl and I made her the little dress I showed last week and made her a cake out of sausage, cheese and red pepper. Several people took pictures of her in the street this week, she is a little ray of sunshine.
I’m going to start doing a weekly round-up of stuff I’ve made or done. This endeavour is part of my new goal to live the life of a Pinterest mom without children. I have finished my last uni related thing that isn’t my thesis, so now I have a lot of free time in which I should be writing the thesis that I am so far spending 100% on other stuff. This will have to change soon, but I plan on taking designated writing days so I will also have days to spend on fun things.
Home improvement
This weekend I built a picknick table. Of course, being lesbians and all, me and my girlfriend are pretty good at building pre-fab furniture but this cheap Praxis-find was not exactly in the same sphere as Ikea’s moron-proof flatpacks. About half the pre-drilled holes were in the wrong spot and pieces were bigger than they should have been. We managed to put it together anyway, I just drilled extra holes and literally just hacked pieces away with an old screwdriver. Now we have a huge picnic table. I’m going to paint it bright pink soon, so more on that later when it doesn’t rain every other day and I can actually paint things outside.
A neighbourhood Cat inspecting the picnic table
I am also still tidying and re-organising up a storm so my kitchen looks amazing. Unfortunately it’s still pretty full as we owned about 25 mugs and cups that sparked joy in our hearts and one entire shelf is taken up by a stack of second-hand plates with fish on them that I consider my fine china, but everything is definitely more organised that before.
Sewing
I have only just finished my last university course so I haven’t really had the time and energy to start making stuff to sell, but I will spend some time next week planning for that. I have gotten back in the groove of sewing a little by fixing some stuff I have lying around for months if not years, and now that I have a newer sewing machine it’s just smooth sailing. I had an old machine that used to belong to my grandma, which makes it sound like it was an amazing vintage Singer with foot pedals but it was actually a super cheap thing from the 80s that started looping the thread uncontrollably the other week. Luckily my mum had a Husqvarna that she only bought a few years ago but doesn’t get around to using all that much since she is so busy making non-fabric related art, so she gave me that one to use for as long as I need it. I also have her old serger so I can start making some pretty professional looking stuff as soon as I replace the needle on that.
The only creative thing I made was today, a little spring coat for Lola. It is her birthday on Friday and I have bought/made her several presents because she is my child even if she is a dog that is mostly interested in sleeping, cheese, being petted with four hands at once and licking her own vag. I always make her wear a jacket outside because chihuahua’s tend to get very cold and shivery, but the pompom-covered fleece one might be a little too warm now that the temperatures are rising so I made her one out of a sleeve that was cut off a t-shirt and added some pompom trim and some shiny ornaments. I think she will look adorable, I know many people think dogs in jacket are stupid but those people need to learn to like fun.
Chihuahua couture, and pincusion with Darkness logo
Food
I baked this ‘kwarkbrood’ (a sort of yoghurt-based cake/bread that tastes a lot like English scones) and because the recipe said to put in an entire sachet of baking powder and I foolishly put that in instead of listening to my gut telling me that was an absurd amount, the bread turned out literally gigantic. It burst out of its silicon  cake tin in every direction. It tasted delicious though, but because of its slightly outrageous size it went a little stale before we could finish it. There’s only so much kwarkbrood a person can eat per day. I decided to turn the leftover bread (about half of it) into bread and butter pudding today and it turned out pretty well! I never made b&b pud before and Pinterest recipes told me highly confusing things ranging from extremely complicated step-by-step guides to making your own custard from scratch to use as a base for a sauce to ‘literally just throw some eggs, milk and sugar on a few slices of bread’. I went with pretty much the latter option after Cat told me that bread & butter pudding is actually just an oven-version of French toast, and it turned out SUPER DELICIOUS.
I sliced the bread, buttered it and put it in an ovendish, then mixed three eggs, some milk, some cream, quite a bit of sugar and a splash of vanilla essence and then poured half of it over the first layer of bread, then added the second layer and poured in the rest and then I put it in the oven for about 20 minutes. It is gooey and delicious and consists of nothing but carbs and fat.
Bread & butter pudding doesn’t photograph too well so here are the Moestuintjes
Last but not least, just like every other stay-at-home mom in the Netherlands I have planted a shitton of Albert Heijn Moestuintjes. For the international readers: leading Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn gives you a tiny little package for every €15 you spend, consisting of seeds, soil, and a small cup to start your own tiny vegetable garden. You can collect twenty different types of seeds for vegetables, herbs and fruit. I also had loads left over from last year when by attempt was completely ruined by mice eating my budding vegetables, so I have enough to potentially start an industrial sized vegetable plantation. This time I put them in a small greenhouse and have mouse-proofed the house a lot better, although I sometimes still see one of the little fuckers running around, so here’s hoping I will soon be making salads consisting entirely of things I have grown in my own Moestuintjes. Does this ever happen to anyone? I only ever see people talking about Moestuintjes in the beginning when they start sprouting three tiny green leafs. But we shall see.
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