First of all, let’s start out with the fact that I’m apparently crazy. This was the deadline I had to meet if I want to graduate in June. Almost no one I know is planning on that, and they did tell us on campus days that most people graduate in August. I heard that and thought “I’m graduating in June.” Chalk it up to my obsession with punctuality. But it means Em & I and possibly Chris are graduating in less than two months! Yay!

Then lets move to the fact that I’m actually more afraid of the rough draft than the final paper. When I turn in the final paper I’ll have gotten feedback on my actual paper, which is way more than you can get from even the best of meetings with your advisor. I KNOW what my paper is about now, and I already have some ideas that I want to expand on. Final draft, improve what’s already there, no problem.

The rough draft was going in blind. By now, almost everyone in my program has realized that this program gives you absolutely no guidance. Plus, most professors HATE our program, because its essentially a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am Masters Degree that forces you to rush things and harass professors who would probably rather work with fully funded PhD students.

And its UChicago. Which means a rough draft cannot be anywhere near “rough.”

So its been touch and go all week. After having meetings on Monday and Tuesday I had an 11th hour epiphany in which I figured out exactly what was missing from my paper. It’s crazy, it had been right in front of me the whole time, but I just wasn’t seeing it. Anyway, once I discovered this I got really excited and into my paper. Unfortunately, it required doing a lot of writing from scratch and going back into my secondary literatures. I actually sort of faked my way through the secondary literature (quite well I must say) and there’s a sub-section I just didn’t have time to write, but the paper works well enough (for a rough draft anyway) without it, and I’ll include it in my final draft. So I was so wired I didn’t sleep on Tuesday and still managed to be high on eleventh-hour epiphanies to get tons done on Wednesday. Thursday, early afternoon, I hit a wall and couldn’t concentrate or get things done and I felt like my paper was falling apart before my eyes, and then my precept gave me bad advice and almost made me cry. Luckily, Chris gave me a pep talk (“it’s just a rough draft. Just turn in your 30 pages, and whatever you have, it’s fine. It’s a rough draft.”) I calmed down around 4 PM yesterday afternoon. Except for a break for dinner with Em and Kate I worked straight on until 11:00 AM today. It was great around 1 AM last night, I knew I had it, and anything else I did would just be fine-tuning on the sentence level. Its great to feel a paper come together like that. Oh, I’m expecting some pretty stringent criticisms, and that part is kind of scary too, but I think in the end this is a good project.