lunch has been cancelled due to lack of hustle

So remember that time that I was getting freaked out by my thesis? Here's a story for you.

I had a meeting with my advisor today. The meeting pretty much went like this:

Shelly: There's no thesis, no coherency, and you haven't proven anything yet. You're not going to, if you continue on as you have been. These are merely notes on your corpora research. Consider them a reference from now on. You need to find this book, read it, and come back in a week with at least three pages written... and it needs to have an actual thesis.
Heather: Okay.
Shelly: When are you presenting? April sometime right?
Heather: April 23rd.
Shelly: That gives us a month. Good luck.

Essentially all the work I have done in the past six weeks is nullified. Which leaves me with absolutely nothing written and A MONTH TO DO IT ALL. So basically I am never eating or sleeping again.

(Conveniently, today I also got a job calling people around dinnertime to have them take surveys. I had submitted an application to the survey center a while ago. This would have been helpful about almost three months ago, when I wasn't doing anything of especial importance. I mean, I was, kind of, but I had the time to be flexible and work on a regular schedule... which is why I put in an application at the beginning of the semester; I certainly wasn't expecting to suddenly have to REWRITE 23 pages/6 weeks of work. Also today I had scheduled a census field worker test, hoping to have a summer job between undergrad and grad school. Go figure - of course today would be the one day I needed to read and essentially know an entire book.)

I think the correct phrase here is "take your balls out of your purse", which is exactly what I did: I ran off to the library, hoping they would have this book (thankfully they did) and IMMEDIATELY start reading it. I only recently finished reading and annotating tonight; tomorrow I'm assembling my thoughts and re-reading parts of it in hopes of being able to start writing on Saturday.

my thoughts today while reading
But this is okay. The way I'm looking at it, everyone has their Thesis Disaster story -- this is mine. It's totally fine. It just means that Beverly, my old and crotchety computer, will not blow up as she has been threatening to do; my hard drive won't erase itself; nobody in my family will die while I write my thesis. Right? Knock on wood, for sure.