It’s been a strange week, full of stress about job offers that either didn’t fulfil the required money/time co-ordinates or failed to materialise entirely. May I register my utter disillusionment with the academic employment market just once more, with feeling?

I’m about to head to Sydney on Saturday for the Queer Space and Queer Asian Sites conferences. I’ve been trying to write part of Chapter One this week, and the paper I’m presenting at QAS (on which I’m also working) is from Chapter Six. You’d think this would mean a clever kind of book-ended, broad perspective on the whole project, but instead I feel torn in two different thinky directions at once, able to give neither my full attention. But the conferences look promising, and loads of people are coming — from as far as Bristol, even! I’m particularly keen to meet Bond, a Thai postgrad who I missed the pleasure of meeting in Bangkok back in June because her wallet was stolen on the day we were supposed to hang out.

Meanwhile, I’ll be absent from the blog. Not that I wasn’t absent already, but you know what I mean.