End of term celebrations

Today is the last day of Lent Term. Tomorrow starts the 6-week "term break" when the undergrads go home to rest, party, and hopefully study for their exams, and the grads hunker down to do all the work that we didn't get to during the busy-ness of term.
An HPS professor who started working here in October is starting a new tradition today - he invited all the 2nd-year HPS students (there's like 100 of them) to the pub! He'll give tonight's lecture and then shepherd the undergrads to the pub!! How amazing is that? and how foreign to Americans! I can't even imagine drinking with my professors as an (underage) undergrad.
In my surprised and admiring reaction to the professor's invitation (which included us supervisors as well as the students), I emailed, "This is so cool of you! What a lovely gesture." This inadvertent and quickly-typed combo of American and British expressions actually totally captured my mixed feelings of how welcoming it would feel to be invited to hang out with your professors, and how strange it would be to go drinking with them.
So I'll go along tonight, get my half-pint of cider, and see what the undergrads make of this incredibly egalitarian event, and hope like crazy that no one gets embarrassingly drunk.

Stuck.

My chapter - my pride and joy a few weeks ago - is not going well. My supervisor said I need to define what makes preparators a group... what unifies this community, when all my data are about how different preparators' work and beliefs and skills are?
Crap.

While busy being stuck on this problem, I searched around my computer looking for... well, who knows what I was looking for, besides a few minutes of distraction. And I found it, in a poem I wrote last spring and forgot about. It had struck me then how the PhD students ahead of me talked about the way they write and how they GET themselves to write when they're stuck - they had very diverse, strange, individualized, "magic" methods. Now I need one!

A line at a time

Quick clicks, or long stares at a blank screen with a few tentative clacks

A line at a time

What makes your words come? What makes you “hot”? “on”? What “loosens your writing fingers”? Is it coffee or clouds or mornings or gin or deadlines?

You know what you want to say. Good thing there’s so much space to say it in.

The white plain stretches between the margins, limitless to the boundary of 80,000 words.

Unreachable? Better not to think about it. “PhDs write themselves”, they say – once you know enough.

5,333 lines. 762 paragraphs. Footnotes not included.

That’s enough to make a contribution to knowledge… right?