So apparently the university screwed up their copy of my
thesis, missed printing out 40 pages when their printer ran out of paper, and
forgot to pass the thesis manuscript along through the chain of command to get
registered.
THEIR missteps; not mine.
I am guilty of only pestering people enough for them to say,
"Silence, minion. Doest thou not
knoweth who we thinketh we art? Thou art
but toe-jam beneath fungus-filled nails.
Away, gnat, away!"
What I should have done is kick the living shit out of them. All of them.
Every last one of them.
The long of it is that I wanted to throw people out windows
(a favorite tactic of mine since Sunday school when I was a toddler). The short of it is that I don't give a Flying
Dutchman anymore. I don't. I have been sitting on 127 pages of a
manuscript for two weeks, trying to beat their deadline, waiting for their
reply, and playing by their rules.
I'm over it. I own
the copyright. THEY can bite ME.
Perhaps I should take a page from my eldest, who is deep
into the essay-writing portion of graduate school applications himself
(business, not English, because he's the bright one and I am not). When trying to determine his short term and
long term goals, he simply tells me: Short team goals = take a
dump and go to sleep; Long term goal = don't die.
I suspect he's on to something.
No, really.
It would be nice if I could take a proverbial academic dump and sleep
with a sound conscience, instead of being shit all over and being rendered
sleepless from the constant anxiety.
Just once. I should be so used to
it by now, though.
I have several emails out there, trying
desperately to get this thesis paperwork done, but this is academia we're
talking about. Educated people who claim
to have read my entire thesis a week ago … but never noticed they didn't print
out the last 40 pages. I mean, it
clearly states that it has 127 pages, and it clearly ends in the middle of a
sentence when you only print out to page 87.
But what the hell do I know? I mean, I only have integrity. There's no damn room for integrity in
academia. What the hell was I thinking?
I'll tell you what I was thinking. I was thinking that since I informally filed
my thesis on April 18th and formally filed it on April 21st,
that I got my thesis in well-before the April 30th deadline.
Now leave me alone. I'm thinking about listening my son's advice
to take a dump and go to sleep, and if I'm wicked lucky, maybe I won't die in
the interim.
