Everything is Coming Up Milhouse!

Last Friday was my thesis defense. I’m going to cut right to the chase….

I passed!

I wasn’t super nervous, because I figured it would be a real douche move to read my thesis, wait two weeks, and then say “oh, btw, you fail.”

(Although there was still a tiny part of me that was worried that they’d award me zero points and ask God to have mercy on my soul.)

My defense wasn’t until 11am, so I got to sleep in a little bit. Which, these days, means sleeping alllllll the way until 7:30am. Crazy, I know! I thought I had time to go for a run, but I am notoriously bad at calculating how long things will take. Which is why I drove all the way to school hissing “shit! don’t be late! shit! don’t be late! shit! don’t be late!” to myself.

Which, of course, is why one of the members of my committee was really running late and we ended up starting around 11:45am.

Of course.

A friend of mine gave me some good advice earlier in the week. He told me to remember that I just spent a school year working on this, and I’m the expert. So I thought it was a good sign that one of the members of my committee led off by reminding me not to be nervous, “because you’re the expert.”

We talked for about an hour. And then they kicked me out of the room. I spent a tense few minutes in the grad student lounge. They called me back in and I was nervous enough that I knocked a whole bunch of undergraduate papers off a shelf.

“We have found your thesis to be satisfactory,” my advisor told me. “Because, you see, that’s what it says here on the form.” And they’d all signed it. In ink! He went on to let me know that I’d be getting an A.

I’m not going to lie, back in November I was pretty firmly convinced that I was never going to finish, that this was my stupidest undertaking ever, that this was all going to end in heartache and extra tuition bills. To know that I’d not only finished, but finished something that I can be proud of? Indescribable.

“Thank you all. Thank you all so much” was all I could say. They told me not to thank them, that I’d done the work. That’s I’d earned it. But I couldn’t stop thanking them.

I told them that this was my proudest accomplishment. With the exception of my daughter, of course.

(Perhaps I will revise that statement when we reach the teenage years.)

That night, Kristian organized a surprise dinner in my honor. We met up with a couple of friends at a local sushi restaurant that I really love. Lilian’s contribution was to stay up an hour and a half past her bedtime with just about no fuss.

Kristian had planned to take her home early and put her to bed, but she seemed so content to sit on his lap and watch his chopsticks, we never bothered. He gave her a bath and put her to bed while I hung out some more with our friends. “Wouldn’t it be great,” I said, “if keeping her up a little late meant that she slept in the next day? Hahahahahaha. That would never happen.”

Spoiler alert! That totally happened.

I woke up the next morning around 8:30 (OMG! So decadent!). I was completely convinced that something was wrong. Because why else would I have been able to sleep so long?

Spoiler alert! Everything was totally fine.

A successful defense. A little extra sleep. A baby who keeps getting more and more delightful. I’m even starting a new (better!) job at my company today.

Everything really is coming up Milhouse.