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A few weeks ago, I wrote to my thesis advisors for the first time in many months.

(Like… six. Or more. Whatever. Shut up.)

After I sent them the first draft of the entire thesis (several years ago) they told me to work on getting Chapter 2 finished first. I rewrote it to the point that they were satisfied that Chapter 2 was “done”.

Then I fell into a pit of not working on my thesis for… well… a long time. Because of reasons.

Therefore when I wrote to them recently, I re-sent them Chapter 2 as a reminder of what the project was about, etc.

I also sent them Chapter 3 to show them that I was working on it, but told them that it was not done.

I then went to work editing and rewriting Chapter 3.

I felt pretty good about the progress I was making.

Two days ago I received an email from my advisor. She had written comments and feedback on Chapter 3.

The unfinished draft of Chapter 3 which I had sent, explaining that it was not done. And had subsequently worked on with considerable rewrites.

Ok. Well. I mean, that’s great, she’s actually giving me more feedback than she’s required to, and her comments are always insightful and helpful (truly! note the lack of umlauts!)… but I … I mean, I really appreciate that but it wasn’t ready for… I hadn’t…

So… I didn’t read her comments for 2 days.

In my defense, I did have to reinstall Office on my iMac before I could read her comments, because she used the “Add Comment” feature in Microsoft Word, and I had been writing in Apple’s iWork. And then I decided that I really need to write a shell script to automate the process of reinstall Office because it’s a giant pain because there are so many updates that you have to install because Microsoft doesn’t just make one cumulative patch, you have to apply them all, and then there was something else and long story short I just didn’t, that’s why.

Aaaanyway… I just read her comments.

Her most favorable feedback was on a paragraph that I had completely removed, because I thought it was superfluous.