Comped

I'm finished!! I finished my comprehensive exam essays and mailed the last two in this morning at 7:30. I wrote 95 pages in three weeks. I guess it's nice to know that I can do that when I have to, although I can't imagine that I'd ever want to do it again. I am not officially finished yet because I still have to defend the nonsense I wrote, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I'll pass at least some of the sections. Surely I won't have to do rewrites on all six essays...surely...Anyway, I have three weeks until my defense and I'm giving myself permission to take those three weeks off from school work. I didn't really get a real summer break this year because in theory I was supposed to have been reading for comps the whole time (so even when I was taking a break I felt somewhat guilty about it). The next three weeks can be a real break, though. Yes, I need to write and defend a prospectus and get going on the dissertation sooner rather than later, but there's no point in working on the dissertation until I'm sure I'm over the comps hurdle. So for once in my life I can spend three weeks reading novels and riding my bike and sleeping in and going on dates with my boyfriend without the nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I should really be working.

I got myself through comps by bribing myself. "Just finish this essay and you can..." I'd tell myself. So now I have a whole list of ways I want to spoil myself. I want to get my hair trimmed, I want to buy new shoes, I want to buy new shower gel, I want to get a massage or a pedicure, I want to use my Barnes and Noble gift certificate. Mostly I just want to do all the things I didn't really have time to do for the past three weeks. This morning I took a four hour nap and when I woke up all I really wanted to do was bake cookies and clean my apartment and make a grocery list because I'll actually have time to cook this week. I'm easy to please, really.

The past three weeks have not been fun. I was in my home office all the time, and if for some reason I wasn't in my office reading and writing, I was thinking about how that's where I needed to be. It's an amazing feeling to be done. Tonight Nicole and I went out with our boys* for all-you-can-eat wings and beer to celebrate the end (for now, at least) of our exams and it was such a great feeling to not have to bring a school book on the subway and to not have to rush home to close myself in the office and get back to reading and outlining. I know I still have a lot of work ahead of me. There's that write-a-whole-book thing that I have to get through somehow. But I feel like in terms of compressing a massive amount of work into a small amount of time, nothing will be worse than the past three weeks have been, and if I can do that, I can do almost anything (for example, Mari has assured me that childbirth is definitely easier than comps).

I'm off to drink several glasses of wine and sleep for 12 hours. Good night!

*I think our boyfriends are happy to have their girlfriends back, too. I've pretty much only been seeing Penn in bed at night and I haven't seen him on weekends at all because he has been going to visit his friends in his hometown on weekends to give me guilt-free time to work. Which was nice of him, of course, but I've been missing him. Still, I know I'm so lucky. Some of my friends have significant others who have no patience with the grad student lifestyle. I have quite literally watched grad school end marriages (sounds ridiculous, but it's true. The combination of lots of work+very little income is hard on relationships, for some shocking reason). Instead of that, though, I have an awesome boyfriend who encouraged me to work all month, who gave me massages when my neck started hurting after hours hunched over the computer, who purposely tried to get out of the house on weekends so he wouldn't distract me, and who bought me "Congratulations on finishing your exams" flowers. He's still too good to be true sometimes, honestly!