Did you ever have really good news, and you're going around telling all your friends and acquaintances and anyone who will listen, and they're all happy for you, and then you run into like, one of your closest and best friends and you off-handedly refer to your good news and they're all "WTF?! You never told me about that!" and you feel kind of like a terrible friend?
So hey blog, I have great news!
I've been working my ass off the past few months to finish writing my art history master's thesis, and then I launched into a massive series of major edits and revisiting my sources and fixing all my citations and rewriting significant sections, and well, it's been a LOT of work beyond what had already been a monumental task.
Because I don't have a desk in my room here, and because I needed to work with about twenty eight books and seventeen stacks of paper at a time, I've been spread out at the dining room table, along with a rather alarming amount of Twizzlers and cookies, in what my family has been calling (sometimes through clenched teeth) "Thesis Central."
So last Friday, after another week of phone calls with my advisor and working on minor edits, we were discussing the conclusions, and abruptly she said, "So that's it. Congratulations, you're ready to publish now." I did a handful of double-takes, followed by trying really hard not to shriek as she continued to talk about some future possibilities in the field and ideas she has for me (which I'll get into later).
After we hung up the phone, with the reality that I have just a few more steps to finish two master's degrees, I was kind of floored. I still haven't really processed what it all means and feels - it may actually be too enormous for my current (exhausted) emotional faculties to handle all at once.
I have, however, been celebrating up, down, and all over the place. I feel like I have a lot of social life to catch up on (why do I want to say "upon?"), and I recognize that I've been leaving a lot of stuff in shambles while I focus all my energies on just finishing the damn thesis. But now it is (basically) done, and my God, what a tremendous feeling.
With this, dear blog, I'm going to try to be less of an absentee friend and more of a, how shall we say,person, again. It may take me a bit to get back into the swing of posting regularly, and I can't promise it won't all be cat photos for a while, but hey, I wrote a master's thesis (!!!!!!!). I can handle some blog posts.
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