Breaking Out the Champagne...Er...Sparkling Cider

For the past five weeks, January 26th has been a huge, looming obstacle that I've been dreading. And I'm a planner, so at any given time, I have a list of at least 5 things that I'm looking forward to in the coming weeks, but ever since December 17th, the farthest I've been able to plan was January 26th. Because this morning, I had my thesis proposal presentation, which was a huge, looming thing on the horizon of my day planner and even though I had things written down for the rest of this week and the rest of this month, I couldn't actually picture any of those things happening because I just couldn't see past the enormity of today. And so, for the past week, I've been completely convinced that the world would end at 10 a.m. today.

It isn't so much that I was worried about the public speaking or the possibility of failure, because if I had been worried about those things, I could have read more books and been more prepared and just generally done things to make myself feel better. Instead, I was worried that my shoes would be mismatched, or that the projector would stop working halfway through, or that zombies might try to take over the world just as I was getting to my hypotheses. And since they don't routinely stock zombie repellent at Kroger, there wasn't really anything I could do to be better prepared for that particular situation.

As it turned out, the zombies stayed put and the world kept going and I spent two hours standing in front of three faculty members and telling them why my master's research was worth doing. Considering the fact that I'm not fully convinced that it IS worth doing, it was quite the feat. The faculty members, for their part, listened and paid attention and asked interesting questions, to which I then made up random answers. But they nodded and smiled and my advisor later told me that all my answers made sense (Really?! Even the one where I made up a name for a statistical test? Hmm...)

So now, I'm going to go back to my planner and look at all those things that I wrote down, but didn't really believe would happen, and I'm going to revel in the fact that Yes! I have plans again!