Said Rachael the wise, when I was in the midst of thesis hell yesterday. I skipped SeniorSem, dragged my tired ass to the drycleaner's, and then came home to address the chaos known as La Tesis. I sat on my couch, facing the window at 5:45 as the sun was just beginning to set, resigned to at least reading over the rough draft that I'd handed in over a week ago, and somewhere around page 12 I fell dead asleep. Kaitlyn, looking very worried that I'd been napping from 12-6:30, woke me up circa sunset, with a dubious "did you mean to fall asleep?" Yes, yes I did. Three hours later, after the sun was fully set (8:36), I regained consciousness.
Feeling pretty bummed about my unpolished, unfinished, and thoroughly incomplete CompLit draft that I handed in, instead of jumping headlong into cutting down the Spanish, I made my prerequisite phone calls to padre (yes, i'm still alive, yes, I've got medicine now) and the boy (yes, i'm still alive, no, i haven't done any work) before performing a full on amputation on the Tesis. It was ugly, it was painful, and I lost about 9 pages in the process. That's 1/3 of what I've written this YEAR. Yikes. Um, shit?
The only thing that sustained me through the process, other than a ganache-covered strawberry, was reminding myself of the extraordinarily brilliant Flash of the Obvious that I'd had with regards to the CompLit monstrosity last week. It dawned on me, right in the middle of class, while we were debating about endnotes vs. footnotes, and the proper documentation for translations [inner monologue: why the FUCK do I care, it's just our damn thesis?] that we're in training for writing those same sorts of journal articles that we've been reading for 4 years.
What's that,Thea? You just realized that you're supposed to have learned something in the past 8 semesters? That in graduating with a BA in two humanities majors you should (reasonably) be expected to write a paper that looks professional? Sigh. It takes me a long time to catch on to these things, ya know? The idea that my finished product should be formally and functionally a solid work did quite a good job in getting my ass motivated to tighten up my habitually loose ends regarding paper writing. I have this tendency to leave things like (Borges, ??) in drafts instead of ("Menard," 56). And I can't even fully communicate the chagrin that I feel with regards to my grammar the past semester in Spanish. Graciela must want to kill me, seriously.
So while I may have lost a great deal of work, I'd rather lose it now and replace it with something that's actually academically respectable, instead of borderline fluff. Goal = 30 pages by Saturday night. You can do it!
[3 down, 8 to go]