Well, it’s official: I’ve submitted the first draft of my thesis for review, and the process was just as much of a pain in the ass as I’d heard it would be.

From a body of program work comprising more than thirty pieces, I needed to select a maximum of sixty pages. In preparation, I spent weeks revisiting all of them, trying to identify which pieces felt strongest, and ultimately narrowed it down to five.

I’d been contemplating doing a collection of linked stories, but initially, I worried that the five pieces I thought were my strongest didn’t have a readily apparent link. The more time I spent with them, however, the clearer their connection became. Once I understood that, the rest of the process suddenly seemed like a piece of cake:

If my rough draft were a cake.

But you don’t sacrifice this much time, blood and sweat and tears and coffee addiction, working on something, only to stop at the finish line–even if you are ready to vomit.

Needless to say, after several days more of revising; six hours of formatting (Can we just all agree that the phrase “Should adhere to official university and program format and style” is code for “You are now entering the ninth circle of Hell”?); one wasted hour of tracking down ink for the new printer; one hour of printing; one hour of reprinting; one hour of obsessively line-checking each page; one hour of driving into D.C. to hand-deliver the draft; ten minutes of arguing with the parking garage attendant that yes, I LITERALLY* ONLY NEED TEN MINUTES BECAUSE I’M JUST DROPPING SOMETHING OFF SO PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LET ME PARK HERE AND I’LL GIVE YOU ALL THE CASH IN MY WALLET; five minutes of hyperventilating in front of the locked door to a clearly empty office; two minutes of grateful weeping on the shoulder of the office staffer who promised to get my thesis to my advisor; thirty seconds of sprinting back to the garage to make my ten-minute window; and one hour of driving home from D.C. (my sincerest apologies to all the motorists I passed on the way, who clearly did not appreciate the volume of my music), the job was done: I could finally relax…

Me, at every stoplight.

…at least until the revision process with my faculty advisor begins.

*Acceptable usage in this case–and ONLY in this case.