How it works is, is you go into this little room on the fourth floor, the one with all the windows along one wall so people can watch you suffer, and on the first and second Tuesdays you have as much time as you want to write answers to two out of three of that day's questions. On the third consecutive Tuesday you defend what you wrote and talk about the four-page reading list with the three professors on your committee. After two hours of that, they send you out and deliberate, which by the clock takes about fifteen minutes, but by your calculations is something more like eleven years.
Next they come and get you and tell you you are officially a.b.d. (all but dissertation), congratulations. Then you hug your graduate advisor and inexplicably start sobbing into his tweedy shoulder.
But what then? You take your dog for a walk in the woods, and this time you don't even pretend to bring a book with you to read while he runs out ahead. Then you come home and take a scalding hot shower and go out to dinner with a friend who's in town for the weekend.
Next, of course, you go bowling, and stay up obscenely late even though you feel as though you have just fought a war or given birth, or given birth while fighting a war. The next day you still aren't quite tuned into the fact that your time is really yours to do with as you see fit, at least until they come and find you and remind you you have to start your thesis.
You have time to take a tango lesson and your boyfriend's mom made cake, and you hear him tell her the story almost in exactly the words you used to tell him and you're airborne, giddy. You even go salsa dancing the next night, make peace with an old nemesis, get a pro bono strip tease (ever notice how when someone says "no pun intended," they always mean "pun intended") and stand by while these guys from Pakistan pick up your girlfriends and try to steal your glasses.
The next logical step is naturally to get sick, since Demon Hyena Cough is going around. Your body's like, oh great, exams are over, time tobleaaarrrrrgggghhhhhhh. So you give Garden State another chance to much more favorable results this time and float on a sea of TheraFlu for the next two days and pending, finally get around to reading the Time Traveler's Wife which you find to be charming but still hit-or-miss somehow. When you are back from being a walking talking virus to being merely a sick human you make a ginormous pot of chicken soup with Amish egg noodles and your friend brings you this humidifier she swears was buy-one-get-one-free but you think maybe she thinks you wouldn't have taken it otherwise.
And you call your folks and tell them you just found out you're a.b.d. and there's a pregnant pause while they process this information and then you laugh and say, no, it's nothing to worry about, I swear. And what comes next? You update your sorely neglected blog and probably go sew corduroy patches on the elbows of all your sweaters and jackets. You smartypants, you.
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