Home Stretch with this Results Chapter Thing

I had a great meeting with DC last Friday (I was in SCT for the day). She was just as excited as I am about the various things I'm finding with my study. More important, she encouraged me to start expressing my own views in terms of, um, "my" theory. Yep, it's mine. All mine. That was a little weird at first, but then again, the point of all of this is to create a theory, so I just need to get over the weirdness.

In the next five days I'll solidify whether or not I'll walk in graduation. I suspect I will, but I do need to make significant progress this week or else I will not make the 3/5 deadline to give DC the first draft of the fifth chapter. What's cool is that I'll start drafting the sixth (and LAST!) chapter after that deadline. Wow, that's pretty swell.

My perfectionist tendencies seem to be kept at bay for now. I'm even to the point where I'm writing paragraph after paragraph, and if I think they suck I literally write [THIS SUCKS] as a marker to go back and edit. A good friend heard an expression saying something like, "I'm just a decent writer, but I'm an excellent editor." I like that mantra.

I think that's similar to my attitude toward being "ready" to graduate. I figure I'm never really going to feel ready till I'm completely finished. But will I ever finish unless I feel I'm ready?? ACK- that's a mad cycle! Instead, I'm just plugging forward, setting hard deadlines and trying to stick to them.

I pay my auto insurance every six months, and I just paid us up through August of this year. What's funny is that the next time I replace those little insurance cards in August, it's very likely I will already have participated in graduation and will have my final defense date set. It's going to be a pretty wild six months. However, the six months prior to the end of both my BA and my MA were exactly like this, so this seems like the perfect time to finish.