The dissertation is in the hands of my committee.
It's an odd feeling, but not one of triumph. Now there will follow a month or more of the horrifying moment when I get THAT EMAIL from the professors full of revisions and corrections and suggestions. Although I'm an experienced writer (as in: sold several stories and comic book stories) and have been edited before, I'm dreading this.
After this, the deluge... or, rather, the presentation and then it's all signed-sealed-and-delivered. I'll have my PhD; the thing I've dreamed about ever since I was six. In truth, it grants me nothing (at my age, no one will hire me) beyond a title that I will wave only under certain circumstances. But since I suspect that the rest of my life will proceed with the same unusual fits and starts that characterized the first part of my life, in the end it's going to provide some real entertainment value.
I had a new thought recently that pleased me -- to wit, that when I round up gangs of people (and I will) for various projects instead of publishing them to a blog, I will now gird up the loins and write a paper or do a conference presentation or some sort of presentation, even if what we did was collect data for a public citizen science project.
So many people have been shyly envious -- not in a mean-spirited way, but a wistful way -- of this degree. I think it will be delightful to sweep them all up and say "we're doing science together, and by the way we're going to show it to a pack of other scientists and then we'll see that it gets published." It is my (unsubstantiated) feeling that if you get people involved with science and you put their names on science, that they start to have a different and deeper perspective on things. My colleague likes to bring science to the kids but I want to bring science to the grown-ups, who outnumber the kids by a considerable percentage and who (in many cases) desperately need a shot of rational thinking.
Eh... idle thoughts for a soft September Sunday.