scrappybadger August 17th, 2007
I got the bound copy of my thesis yesterday! It was quite exciting, much more so than I thought it would be. I expected some crappy paperboard binding with a big green strip of library tape holding it all together. Instead, I got a black, hardback copy with the title, year, and my name printed on the outside. I’m almost glad that the university forced to me to buy at least one copy before I could graduate.
This is what my thesis looked like before.
I was playing with my cell phone and took pictures of it in sketch mode. What you’re seeing is the journal that I used for all of my notes and preliminary drafts. You’ll see several tabs sticking out, but those multiplied. Their babies came in every size, color, and shape that you can imagine. Though organized, it was a mess.
This is what my thesis looks like now.
Quite lovely isn’t it? I swear you’d be more impressed if you’d written part of it.
I will treasure it forever and ever, or until I reread it and am so embarrassed that I scratch the fake gold lettering off the outside.
scrappybadger April 28th, 2007
This blog is a graduation present of sorts. A week ago yesterday I turned my thesis in to the Registrar’s Office at my university. It was frustrating and exhilarating, but I’ll save the story of the day’s events for another time. That one act was the culmination of almost a year and half’s work. In that time I stopped blogging altogether. I tried to keep up my online writing, but there wasn’t space for it in a life filled with long hours searching through microfilm reels, reading secondary source materials, and the tortuous process of figuring out exactly what the heck I was trying to say. All of my mental processing power was devoted to my thesis with the occasional leftovers going to teaching my freshman composition classes. I did have some free time, albeit not much, but I couldn’t do much more than watch television or lie, vegetable-like, in the bed worrying about what I had already written and how much I had left to write. So, blogging took a back seat, or, rather, it rode in the trunk under student essays and musty blankets. When the free blog host I was using went kerplooey I thought about finding another, but I couldn’t muster the energy for anything more than a cursory exploration. I didn’t like any of the free stuff I saw, and I couldn’t justify spending the money to host my own blog. Thus, my blog bit the dust, and I occasionally mourned its lost, but those thoughts were usually quickly replaced by some thesis induced panic or other.
Once I was convinced that the light at the end of the tunnel was more than a mere hallucination, I started to think about blogging again. It usually happened along the lines of, “If I had a blog I would totally write about X.” Then, a week ago, when I turned my thesis in for what I hope to hell is the very last time ever, I decided that I deserved to do something nice for myself. I might still be patching the holes in my jeans with denim patches, I continue to wear the same four t-shirts every day, and Piig and I can’t afford to go anywhere outside of a 45 mile radius of our house, but I was determined to spend a few dollars on a domain name and some web space. I’d worked hard and I needed a reward. Now here I am, permanently badgerfied by a long, hard thesis experience, but at least I’m blogging again.
 It’s been a while; is this what normal feels like?
