I need to get this done

Ok, it’s noon, I’ve been working (with some relocations/bathroom breaks) since a bit before 9, and I have re-read all of my chapter 4 plus made some revisions to the hole in the middle of it. You know, it looks pretty good! It is very close to done. I had much less to do on it than I thought, but I had been working so steadily at it and was feeling so beaten down and demoralized that I was too close, like putting the page up right against your nose til you can’t focus on the words properly. I had thought it sucked and that I had so much piles left to do on it that I would never be able to finish it, so I moved on to the other chapter. Actually it was almost done --- much closer than my chapter 5 is put together --- but I had been too tired out by it to see that.

It was cold and refreshing here in the library earlier, although that plus lots of coffee was still not keeping all this tiredness at bay, and now it is hot and stuffy, in a foggy-outside- the-air-pressure-may-be-changing-with-a-storm kind of way, and that will make staying awake even tougher. Still, I want to go through and make all my rephrasing/editing changes on the chapter now, I want to type in what I did to the hole, and I want to clean up the ending including making the conclusion have a rousing ending sentence. I need to get at least that much done today.

I would love to turn this in today --- I feel like it’s that close --- but there is a huge mess in the footnotes and I haven’t started on them yet, plus lots of biblio material I need to add still. And I need to write captions and print the pictures, or put them into the computer file, or whatever I decide.

Therefore, I vow to fix all the in-text problems today, at school, and get as much of the biblio done here as possible, and then finish all the book-checking-stuff at home tonight, and I swear, as Scarlet O’Hara is my witness, that I shall leave the printed and finished chapter in my committee’s inboxes tomorrow, bright and early in the morning tomorrow!

For tomorrow is another day.

(Hey man, if I can't wear fancy dresses made out of curtains while dissertating, I don't want to play! Everyone should embrace their inner diva at least once during the dissertating process.)