Thesis Successfully Defended

I defended my thesis novel yesterday. My advisors came in and sat down, and after a small chat about what my sister is naming her baby (Cosette, like the girl from the musical Les Mis. She's going to call her Coco, to go along with the baby's older sister Zuzu. It's like having two monkeys) they asked me to explain where I got the idea for my novel. So I began: "Two summers ago I was on a day off from camp, watching AMC, when this movie called Time Cop came on..."

The night before I went to see the band Passion Pit in Kansas City. Three of my brothers - all Eta class members, my pledges - went with me.

They all look like they're off The Big Bang Theory, don't they?

The concert was general admission, which meant standing with no personal space in a crowd of three hundred. We ended up with a good spot, surrounded by a group of drunk girls. The most sober one was kind of cute. She said she was from Lewis and Clark College in Portland. She said it was spring break.

The most drunk of the girls, Holly, came in at this time and asked me where I went to school; Arkansas, I said. "ARKANSAS! I'm going there next year!" Her friend tried to recover, and say Holly had taken a semester off, but then Holly yelled, "What are you talking about? We're in high school!" I threw up in my mouth.

The worst part was, my brothers didn't care. They were all just a grade older than these girls, so their drunk flirting was at the very least flattering. I spent the concert brushing Holly's hands away from my chest hair.

We got back into Fayetteville at 3:30 a.m. I had to defend my thesis in eight hours, and I felt like I had danced my way through a 5K and clocked a pretty respectable time. I got to my defense room half an hour early and took a power nap.

My committee were in agreement about several things. There are too many characters. The narrator is intrusive and needs to be cut. Everyone dies for way too long. The characters' mission and enemy needs to be defined earlier. I told them most of the problems arose because I had watched too much Lost.

I don't know my thesis score. They don't tell you until graduation. What I do know is this: while I sat in the hallway, letting them deliberate, the only full sentence I heard was, "We can't give him that score; he referenced Jean Claude Van Damme."