Today I emailed out my dissertation proposal to my committee members. Granted, I’ve done this before, but now it was sent out with the explicit request of setting up a defense hearing in early December. What this means is that I might actually be ABD before the end of the year. I know, I know. It sounds crazy. I mean, who ever heard of getting one’s dissertation proposal accepted after only 5 freakin’ years in the program?* Not that I should be counting my chickens before they hatch. Even though I’ve sent this proposal out to everyone on my committee before, I don’t know that any of them have actually read it before. So it seems entirely plausible that with the prospect of a deadline looming, they will actually read it now and tell me that I need to spend another six months working on it. Man, that would be so awful. Yet entirely plausible. Regardless, it’s out of my hands right now. So I’m going to spend the rest of the afternoon trying to read a little French (don’t ask me why no one ever translated this Treatise on Insanity in Animals into English) and then I’m off to dissection lab later. Woohoo!

*Sarcasm alert: for those of you not initimately acquainted with the normal academic timeline.