It's done.

The writing of it, at least. All 211 pages of it. It's currently in the hands of the company that will print it on 25% cotton paper and hard-bind it with a goldstamped leather cover.

Yes, it's that serious. And it cost me actually $100 to get it printed and bound.

But, as much as I hemmed and hawed about this whole process, I have to say that I have come to be quite attached to my thesis over the course of the last month. It became a much more significant project than I was anticipating it to be before I actually ran any of the data. In my head, before I'd really written anything other than my literature review, my thesis was just going to be this thing I did because I needed to graduate, a sort of embarrassing little work that was too long to be published as an article but not good enough to be a book and thus kind of useless. And maybe none of those things have changed, exactly, but I still somehow came to see it as this thing that actually represents me.

This may have something to do with the meeting I had with my advisor a week ago, during which he basically told me that the draft I'd turned in was fine for someone who was just looking to fill the requirement of writing a thesis, but that I seemed like I wasn't that person. I seemed like I was a person to whom academic work is significant, and thus he was going to show/tell me all the ways I could do what I was doing better. And it nearly took everything I had and caused at least two minor breakdowns, but I did nearly everything he suggested. I am a being of integrity, and I've come to believe that my thesis is as well.

The proverbial fat lady hasn't sung yet, because I still have to email an electronic version, print out my two unbound copies, pick up this bound copy tomorrow, and walk the whole 633 pages over to my departmental secretary's office by 4pm tomorrow. I told the company I'd like to pick up the bound copy by 1pm, so that should be fine. Of course I also have to be obnoxious and take pictures with my bound copy to send to my parents and post here. 

So I suppose that I shouldn't talk about the entire process like it's over yet, to ensure that I don't bring any bad thesis karma into the world (it's bad enough already that it's due on Friday the 13th. Not cute.), but it already feels strange being able to distance myself from this giant thing that I've been working towards for so long. I suppose that it's a miniature version of how I'll feel a couple days after graduation, when I'm suddenly just a person in the world rather than a student at Princeton University. 

And that leads me squarely to #holyshititsending, which I'm not prepared to deal with at this moment, so, on to other topics!