Fillet of Soul

It's the eve what's sort of the final d-day for the thesis -- I submitted the final draft to the two hold-outs of my committee last Friday, and I'll be hearing from them as to what needs to be changed before I hand it in to the graduate college this Friday. When I do that, it's all over, and presumably I get my degree and ponder the next phase. But the rub is: will the changes be of a cosmetic enough nature that I'll be able to incorporate them into the paper before 3 pm on Friday? And even if they're too extensive to handle this week, will I be able to pass it off to my committee chair, who thought it was peachy weeks ago, and get my degree anyway behind the other committee members' backs? Would I even contemplate such a thing? Bet your ass I would. Especially when I got the White Stripes playing on my computer, "In the Cold, Cold Night," and everything's feeling surrealistically amoral at the moment anyway.

Hope it doesn't come to that, though -- I have no idea how extensive these changes might turn out to be, and god knows I can throw down a boatload of research in one week while parlaying two jobs and dishes and laundry and whatever else, but I've been smelling the end of the road -- the life without the thesis or schoolwork or objects limiting the transition to something beyond crappy research assistantships with clinically insane directors. I'll put my name to a Collected Works of Barney if it means this thesis goes away at the end of the week.

Happily, my committee chair called tonight and asked me to stop by tomorrow with that page of the thesis that gets signed by the committee chair and the committee chair alone, which validates it for submission to the graduate college. And, as Harry Connick once said, I'll be there with bells on.