Vicious cycle

Today, I was trying to finish the final draft of chapter 1. I was determined to stay at uni until it was ready to send off to my supervisors. It's not done. I'm going home. Oh well.

There are two sections that still need major work, and a few smaller points to deal with. I don't ever seem to finish a whole draft in one go. Whenever I send it to my supervisor for feedback, there are always notes to myself in the margin (love the "Comment" feature in Word!) on parts that still need more work or questions that I still need to answer. And then my supervisor adds more comments (he loves Track Changes!), some of which get dealt with as soon as I get the revised version back, but others have been waiting around for a year or more.

While I was working on one section today (criticisms of the "Jacob thesis" concerning the "Anglican origins of modern science," in case you're interested), I came across an old loan slip in one of the books I was using. It seems I borrowed the book on May 6, 2005, and most likely, that wasn't the first time. It reminded me of how long I have been working on this thesis - the number of times I've borrowed particular books and still not finished using them - the way I've gone over, and over, and over these chapter drafts, and they're still not done - the amount of time I've spent on this thesis (nearly 5 years), though it still feels like a last-minute job - and the fact that I'm supposed to submit the thesis on December 15, but there's still so much work to do!

AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGG
GGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(In case you were wondering, as I'm sure you all were, the book in question was Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660-1750, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992.)