Ph.D.-students are such masochists. We spend the days locked up in little rooms, comparing ourselves to the writers of the most interesting and brilliant works which become the base for our own work and the measuring stick for quality. Of course most of us have to fail in our own minds. Our topics become familiar and trivial... and doubt eats at what little confidence we might have left. I wonder how come we endure. Sometimes I think it's just that we are too stupid to realise that what we are trying to do is impossible. Luckily, we are skilled at hiding truths like that from ourselves. Or at least I am. I don't know about the rest of the world, really, I am just generalising from a very small universe. That's qualitative methods, right?