In which I have a thesis breakthrough, and then a problem.

I was going to write a post this weekend, assuring you that I had all sorts of fun last week in addition to putting in ungodly library hours. And I did have a nice time: a group I'm in on campus (Americans for Informed Democracy) put together several really cool events over a couple of days, so I promoted those and then went and ate cheese at those (yea, they were classy enough to be catered) and listened to lectures and took the visiting speaker out for drinks and chatted about neocolonialism.

Anyway, then it was the weekend and I did not have any more free time, so you'll have to trust me that each of those events was super-fun, and work was going pretty well.

And then, this morning! O, this morning! I blew off work (again) to go work on my thesis at the library, and suddenly the stars aligned and all of the cases matched my hypothesis wonderfully. And I wanted to skip all my classes and tests and papers this week and just write the thing before that beautiful beautiful outcome slipped away, through my fingertips.

And then I went to the library this afternoon, looked closely at my spreadsheet, and realized that an error in one of the formulas was vastly misrepresenting some of my data. I very nearly exploded, dear readers, all over the library carpet.

But never fear! It's actually not as bad as I thought, and I think I've salvaged some of the thought processes from the old explanation to apply to the new reading of the data, and I believe I should have a coherent narrative, once I work out a couple of kinks. I'm still vastly farther along than I was, say, last night, and I feel like I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, as long as I narrowly define "light" as "getting to write my thesis, on a computer, in paragraphs, instead of just scribbling reams of notes and charts and lists and bullet points on the back of whatever scrap paper I can scrounge up from the library printers."