It's taken 14 months - yes, 14 months - to do something very simple: convert a csv. file to excel and then import it into SPSS. I almost cannot comprehend why I made this so difficult. First, I didn't have SPSS and then I didn't know what to do with the csv. file. Using Google to figure this out was an idea that came slowly. As for lifting my butt off my chair to find out how to load SPSS...That was not difficult once I did so and cost R50 and 30 minutes of my time. Gavin took under eight minutes to do the conversion and I less than two minutes to import the data into SPSS. And there it is: ordered, neat, complete. Fifteen minutes versus 14 months.
The 1 800 files that have occupied all my floor space will be returned and something that has taken up space, physically, intellectually and psychologically for 3/4 years will literally vacate my life. A kind of freeing is taking place. Now if only I can make some real, concrete progress on my PhD, like finishing a draft and submitting it to a journal.
Time to pick up speed because I need to start moving on. I've been a student for six years now and need to get on with my life. I don't know what it's going to look like but this Groundhog day of repetition, stasis, limbo, vacuum, void, slow atrophy and inertia must come to an end. It's like I've resigned myself to an endless nothing of more of the same nothing.
At the risk of sounding trite: the new can only enter one's life once the old makes space and gives way. But no chasing after the shiny and novel until these things are done with, completed, finished, ended.