So the forms are now all handed in, and on Monday I hear who my project supervisor will be - I wonder if the cost of their therapy is taken out of my tuition fees?

Despite being awake since about 09:30, I’m still suprisingly alert at 03:45! I suppose it can be considered time to dwell on the aftermath - decisions I’ve made, people I’ve affected or hurt, realisations or ponderings for the future, and a certain guilt.

There are some decisions in life you make that you know will affect people to their core and yet you realise that dwelling on those decisions is draining you, both phyiscally and mentally, interfering with the way you think and act, and preventing you from dealing with other matters at hand. For that reason, and that reason alone, you know you have to make the decision and just live with the consequences, if only to give yourself a peace of mind.

To those who have witnessed my self-destructive moods since term started, I can only apologise for my behaviour.

On a lighter side, I feel I have finally found my place within the University. The modules I’m taking this year are amazing, especially Life Cycle of Languages and the forthcoming Natural Language Processing. Being the only student doing a certain combination of subjects has not been easy, but now that I am discovering modules in both disciplines which draw on aspects of the other (hopefully giving me a certain edge) I finally feel like it is all coming together.

I went to a talk the other day on “Linguistics on the Web” by one of the ICS professors, which looked at research being carried out into which languages are represented online, why languages are not, and the trends that are developing. It was incredibly interesting and got me thinking that maybe I want to go on and do a postgrad after all, something I had never given much thought to before.

Everything happens for a reason, and everything has its time. Despite the obvious stress and workload of the coming semester, I’m looking forward to it and where it leads me.