"So how does it feel?" they ask. Well, not really any different, except for the relief. Still, there are signs.

• My labmates call me doctor. Which is rather ridiculous. Except for the fact that I did the same with every single person who graduated from this lab before me. So I guess this is normal. Plus it's at best followed by my first name.

• There is champagne in my fridge. Not cava or prosecco or any of these less-than-six-dollars bottles of bubbly. Real champagne.

• There are flowers I didn't buy on my dining table. They are gorgeous.

• Mah phone. It keeps a-ringing. Same with Facebook, Twitter, and the blog's comment feed, if they had a ring tone.

• "Congratulations!" people yell when they see me, just before hugging me and asking when they can buy me a drink. Well take a ticket dear, because there's only so much booze I can ingest per night. (And it is, by many people's standards, quite a small quantity. What can I say, I'm a cheap date. Especially as I insist to pay every other time.)

What else is there to add to this title?

Well here we go folks...

Short nights, defense-related dreams and minor freak outs started on Thursday, a bit earlier than I expected it, but not surprisingly altogether. Friends have been lovely, sending messages to check with me and inviting me over for lunch or dinner to help me relax.

I had a wonderful evening on Saturday, eating a North-African inspired dinner with my favorite woman in the whole of the United States and her boyfriend (who is defending his own dissertation on Thursday), and chatting about topics as diverse as wireless electricity, racism^[1], religion, strong women, non-traditional relationships, and whether or not I would find myself suddenly falling for someone in the US during my last month here^[2].

I have been sent good vibes from all over the Northern hemisphere; my labmates sent an invitation to a bowling and dinner party for tonight that contained the words "inevitably successful"; and even the committee member I am the most worried about (who is very kind but also very rigorous) emailed me to say he had read the draft, was impressed, found it full of interesting ideas and thorough work, and is sure I will do well. All this, of course, doesn't really prevent me from feeling quite stressed out at this very moment.

And in a minute I'll go, make some coffee, and start setting up the room.

Two words for you: impostor syndrome. I am amazed by the number of people I have fooled into believing I am competent, especially among my labmates. "Oh, don't worry, you know all that," concludes my closest collaborator while my mind freezes, trying to grapple pieces of information about "all that" among the pitiful danger signals sent by my panicked brain.

Also, I have the self-confidence of an abused whippet, as best illustrated by my sheer delight at each of the guests who confirms their presence to the goodbye and celebration/commiseration party I am planning for a few days after I defend. People I call friends want to come drink sparkling wine with me before I leave the continent! Hold the presses! I am still not getting over the fact that one of them is postponing a trip to Texas by a day to attend.

And mostly, I am too busy wondering what kind of tricky questions I will be asked on my defense to take the time to write anything more.

Folks, I handed the damn thing in. Can you believe it? It's 193 pages long (176 without the title page, acknowledgements, abstract, and other tables of contents; 163 without the references) and I dearly hope I don't have to edit a single word from it...

Is it fucking over yet?
I never thought it would be possible to be so fed up with something as innocuous looking as a dissertation. Even working on a different section when I can't take the first one any longer doesn't work any more, because I loathe every single goddamn part of it. Who the fuck, I ask myself, gives a shit about the whole lot of it, and truth be told, an estimate of 10 people in the entire world at any point in time seems to be stretching it a bit. Including all the tables of figures and mandatory resume and whatnot, it is currently 196 pages long, and even knowing that the font size, line spacing and margins have clearly been developed by someone with a deep hatred of trees, this seem like an awful lot.

My my my, we're getting closer and closer, aren't we! A little under a month left! I cannot wait.

Strategery
Week 5 had me actually meeting with Advisor in person; we mostly discussed where to try and publish the work I have just completed in a subfield that neither of us is an expert in, meaning that we do not know the journals and conferences very well. What I have done is a rather direct application of an algorithm we have developed for an entirely different purpose, and published in a journal that has probably very close to no visibility to said new applicative subfield, so I am sure a short communication would be quite relevant, but these people only seem to publish long and detailed articles on entirely novel research. In the end I was to come up with a strategy (under the guidance of our conversation), which mostly meant sitting around eating lollipops and virtually flipping through the electronic pages of relevant journals, occasionally chuckling at a particularly incongruous-sounding title. We have made a decision, though, and I am careful to hide my hunches that the paper will be rejected.

Three weeks left before I hand in the dissertation. Wish I could spend more time typing at once and be done with it. Still wishing for it to be over much more than worrying about it. Still spending most of my non-working time either dancing or starting to pack. You know what's funny? I think I'm rather happy.

See, I am trying and trying and trying to get rid of at least some of these bulky, heavy books before moving out in September; and I have even made a neat little pile of 22 pounds of books I can accept to live without. Well, the pile was much bigger, but I gave bags of them to friends. Still, I have a lot left. 22 pounds. Most of them French translations of novels written in English (I really cannot figure out why those aren't any more popular among people who can all read and enjoy the original directly!). What am I going to do with them? I want them to be read! And enjoyed! I cannot just throw them away, right? They're books! You don't throw books away! It's against my (absence of) religion!

So why don't you have a look through that list to see whether or not you would enjoy some of them dear little books? If you pay for shipping (which I realize it can still be quite expensive if you're living on the other side of the pound but, have a look, will you?) I'll be more than delighted to send them to you.

The wrist is still hurting so I'll be brief.

(1) I'm so ecstatic at the idea that it will soon be over that I don't have time to flip out. This might change soon.

(2) Thank goodness for dancing.

(3) When you write several fellowship applications, there is a stage when you move from creating content to rearranging content so as to fit specific requirements. Then once you have rearranged said content, you have to give it the right size. I have literally spent hours fitting an 8 pages research plan into 15,000 characters and then again into 1,500 words. I am pretty sure they use stubbornness as a discriminative criterion.

(4) If you wonder what kind of things carpal tunnel syndrome does to your handwriting, wait no longer and have a look on the French side of the blog. You'll get my rather vague recipe for hummus thrown in.