The last few weeks of a doctoral thesis

I'm counting down the weeks till I submit the thesis I've been working on since October 2002. That 's a long time for a single project. Most of the hardwork has been done -- that is hard work in the form of thinking through the ideas and writing it all out. I'm now in the last stage -- the detailed editing: dotting i's, crossing t's and checking footnotes and typos. It is all rather tedious. I guess one of the most difficult things to cope with is knowing that this beast of a thesis will be over in terms of the focus and committment that it has required over the last three years particularly, but also not being sure as to what life will be like after it is done. I suppose spending more time doing other things (such as blogging etc) is a way of preparing for something else, a life not totally controlled by the need to express clearly a rather esoteric line of research. This is of course the sort of thing that they don't prepare you for in 'education'. Maybe this is the real heart of what it means to become a "Dr."
The irony is that, in many ways, that is exactly what my thesis actually argues: for a basis for intellectual work in life itself, as a way of articulating the contours of life's ambiguity and contingency, as well as its joys.