endgame.

now, the job is done.

rather, one job is done;
i've kept one promise, and there are a few more to keep.

but this was the most important one.

---

i went to rackham graduate school [1] today with an unbound copy of my thesis, and i met with a friendly woman who walked me through the formatting.

there were no rulers.

there was no transparent sheet to put over pages,
in order to check specifications, such as margin lengths (to the millimeter).

there was nothing of the sort,
no draconian measures taken,
nothing to weed out graduates unmindful of the rules and regulations.

..then again..

i had to rename a chapter or two, because their titles said "appendix" and the graduate school couldn't have that .. but that was all.

no complaints here.

when it was all done, the woman who helped me gave me a official certificate, that i have "hereby completed all requirements towards a Ph.D at the U of M" or something like that.

amazingly enough, they spelled my name correctly.
there was even a shiny gold University seal on it.

so i guess i am a doctor now.
it still doesn't seem real.

i had thought that the toil of editing and re-editing and more re-editing of the thesis manuscript would sink in the idea.

by the time i submitted my thesis, i would feel that i deserved it, for all that this year and years have put me through.

well, no. it still doesn't seem real.
can i be really Dr. _____?

no matter, that;
titles are of little importance, anyway.

---

when i woke up this morning, i thought a little about what would happen if this actually worked out [2]. nothing came to mind, and it worried me.

when this is done, will i have a purpose?

when you've spent every waking day, either working or worrying,
pushing yourself to finish "one last thing" ..

.. which becomes a half-dozen things,
and takes an hour longer than you'd have liked ..

.. when you fret inwardly,
even when you see your friends at conferences,
itching to go back to work because you feel you must ..

when it is all done, what then?

before my meeting, i received an email. someone's asking about my Ann Arbor talk. someone wants to know a few more details.

someone actually cares?!?

so for now, i have a question to answer and an email to write. come to think of it, there are a few other questions to think about ..

.. a few more promises to keep.

i don't know why, but unconsciously i thought that my world would collapse, once the matter of a thesis was settled. i can deal with disasters -- i call it "graduate school" -- but successes and endgames ..

.. i never plan for those.


at any rate, there's work to do and i want to do it;
more to come, about that.

[1] though i am/was a graduate student in the mathematics department, there is a single graduate school for the entire U of M, called the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies.

[2] this morning and the night before, i mostly thought of contigency plans B, C, and D, in case the rackham people felt that something was wrong with my thesis formatting.

for the record, plan B was to rescale the printout margins, plan C was to remove all footnotes (which were unnecessary but slightly informative) for new versions of plan A and B, and plan D was to figure out how much summer tuition cost, if it came to that.