Tuesday 7th October 2008

The new PhD students have been arriving in dribs and drabs over the last week, and today I got talking to one of the new kids at coffee. The standard chit-chat ensued: ‘so, what are you studying, where were you before, what college are you at?’, you know, that kind of thing.

It wasn’t long before she asked the dreaded question: ‘What do you do when you’re not doing physics?’ This one always makes me freeze up and stare at the floor. I think my nerves stem from being overly self-analytical; if I were listening to my response, I might be quite interested (but then, I am interested in all the same stuff as me). However, there’s something a bit tacky, mawkish and crap about listing your ‘hobbies’ which makes me self-conscious. Here goes.

  • The time-eating pastimes of choice for me at the moment are all because I accidentally became editor of a science magazine. I still feel the need to shamefacedly preface that with ‘accidentally’, which is partly because it’s true (I applied intending to write an article and I let things get out of hand in the interview), but partly because editing a science magazine screams ‘nerd’, even in a physics department. Although outreach-type stuff is probably cooler than regular physics, the fact that you’re giving up your free time to do it more than outweighs any kudos you might receive.
  • Photography is a difficult one to explain. I don’t really have a genre as such, so no chance of using that as a lead-in. Plus there’s an awkward balance to be struck between taking a few snaps with your mobile and being a camera nerd with more lenses than friends. This leaves you wanting desperately to say something like ‘my pictures are good, honest!!!’, but in a roundabout, likeable, witty and modest way which makes your photographs sound so incredible that your explainee immediately offers to model nude for you.
  • ’Blogging isn’t something I feel I can proudly confess to, either. As with all my hobbies, connotations of nerd-dom are stirred up double-quick (maybe I am just a nerd?) and, as with photography, I’ve not really got a genre, as such. I could say ‘recounting episodes from my life, wringing amusement from self-deprecating observations’, but I’m British and even that meta-mocking description is too self-important to declare to a stranger.
  • The guitar is perhaps the exception to the rule, being the one I daren’t say because it has pretentions of false cool. There are two types of people who play the guitar: people who are cool (and this list has firmly established that I’m not one of those), and people who think they’re cool (a category far, far worse than uncool but socially aware enough to realise it). Is guitar-playing a last-ditch attempt by a nerd to win back some street cred? Of course not, I just enjoy the noises it makes, pretending to be a rock star, and ad-libbing simplistic songs comprising only chords I, IV, V and vi. But, as you labour the point about these simple pleasures, is there not a hint of the lady doth protest too much?

Anyway, that trite handful aside, my main hobby is probably ‘wondering where all the time goes’, since I don’t really feel I get up to much and yet here we are, a year after I started my DPhil, and a year does indeed seem to have elapsed by all conventional measures.

 

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