Zeno and I have crossed our finish line.

The last -- not even weeks, last two or three months of this dissertation had really started to seem endless.  The day job thing -- well, I took a couple weeks off, and did need every minute I got, and in addition to permitting me to tear through a ton of research and writing, my sabbatical also gave me good, scientific data on how there's no way I can have a non-academic job and pursue anything resembling independent academic work.  Under statistically identical circumstances of stress, exhaustion/energy, financial resources, etc., I do as much in one good day on my own as I do over a week while working at my office.  Good to know.  Better to know if I can get a tenure-track line at a university that cares about research & writing, but it's good information, regardless.

Have you ever let your house go to where it's super cluttered, and then started cleaning?  You know how you can "clean the house" and then, sitting around in the evening, before you even get to feel proud of yourself, you realize that your primary accomplishment has been revealing more mess that you now have to deal with?  It's possible to go through at least four or five iterations of this.  I certainly have.  Revising my chapters worked like that, plus I was still writing the Crane one.  It just -- it really wasn't ever going to end.  I was going to be eighty years old and still writing pages and fixing sections so they made sense with each other and checking citations.

But I won't, after all.  360 pages, 116,109 words, and it's done.  I have yet to email it to my committee because I want to use Dropbox's public folders and the entire internet appears to be too busy to check one of my links to verify that it works -- but it's done.  There are things I'd fix, a few more articles I know of that I should track down, at least one book and one essay collection that came out in the past few months, etc., and I may very well deal with those things between now and when I submit it to ETD -- but it's done.  My defense will go off on December 1 and although I'm sure we'll have plenty of material for conversation, there's no real chance I won't pass, so this also means that my PhD is done.  Less than a month and I can even take the title.

Au revoir, life as a grad student.  Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.