Thesis Sickness

100 g cacing. Buat gulai…

I must admit. It’s hard to finish writing a thesis. It’s a never ending story. You write and write, but there are always rooms for improvement. Starting from getting to get my project title, I already knew that it would be a tedious job. My supervisor asked me to carry on with her project; about earthworms.

And so I agreed since I was quite interested in worms, though never even touch worms for quite some time. And then we met the earthworms. When I mentioned ‘we’ it includes my lab partner. He and I did the same method, but for different elements.

Meeting the earthworms was not a small deal. You have to open the cover, which requires two grown-ups for the task, you need to feed them with cow’s dung, and also needs two grown up males. And not to mention, the mosquitoes! Unless you burn some bonfire, the mosquitoes kept coming for your blood. And the mosquitoes were like, a whole nation or something since there was lots of them. LOTS AND LOTS OF MOSQUITOES! Sometimes the mosquitoes really ‘geram’ to suck my blood, that my arms looked very red.

And once we found a rat’s nest inside the cow’s dung, together with her babies. I can tell that her babies were drinking her milk because when we dig her nest and she quickly ran away, some of her babies were tossed here and there.

To start our project, we have to first let the worms reproduce for more worms so that they would be enough to start the project. When finally the amount of earthworms is sufficient, we need to collect them. 300 g of earthworms requires 1000 earthworms, and to collect 1000 earthworms, you have to dig the pond from morning till evening, literally. So when we need 1800 g of earthworms, we needed 6000 earthworms and it consume a whole week just to collect them.

Does this looks like spaghetti?!

 Then we put the earthworms into their respective ponds. And then came the storm. The pond is filled with storm water, and the earthworms surfaced to get some oxygen. Pity worms! It took us another 2 hours to dry the ponds back.

And after 30 days, then only can we collect the sample. It took another full day to collect all the samples from the pond.

After that, came the lab analysis. It took me another 2 days to let the earthworms suffer a slow death, another 2 days to oven-dry the earthworms, and 1 day to digest the worms in acid.

And after the results came out, I had trouble in analysing it. And the day that I’ve got my results, is one week away from final submission to coordinator. Then the weekend, I got finishing school to attend.

Then I started writing my thesis feeling like in hell.

I never knew that writing a thesis can really mess up your life. I literally forgot to eat, too busy to take bath, and too nervous to sleep.

Most of the time, I was fed with adrenaline, when no food enters my digestive tracts, and I was too tense and anxious while writing. The only thing that supplies me energy during that kind of moment was the feeling of despair.

And it bothers me that I couldn’t' even cry, because I was too tired that I couldn’t even afford my energy to produce tears!

Finally that it’s over, oh wait, it’s not over yet! VIVA! Damn! This is fricking tiring! I need to prepare my slides!

Now, the best thesis will win RM500, and so for best presenter. Hmm, maybe should try my luck you know. Maybe I should give it a shot, ‘alang-alang’ tired having trouble with a thesis, I should win over my exhaustion!