how does it feel? was what almost everyone asked me last night, and honestly, it's quite hard to say. i can tell you how it doesn't feel. it doesn't feel like when i finished my last exam as an undergrad and drove back to duke from beaufort with mamie in joy and fear. i'm not sure i would describe happiness as coming into it at all, really. it's like -- it's like in those vampire shows where the protagonist lets her vampire true love feed on her because he's dying, and then she's on death's door herself but has Saved him. or in les miserables, where eponine's been shot, and she's in marius' arms, and she's like: it's all good. or like: "o captain! my captain! our fearful trip is done". something like that. and somewhere beneath all that, you want to laugh at how silly and melodramatic that sentiment is because after it's bound and shelved, the years will bury it, as they'll bury hundreds and thousands of other theses from now until the end of history; i don't think they even last in the way that we would romantically like to believe that memories do, or love, because the specific way you thought about your little problem is for no one else to share, so that even as the knowledge may be transmitted, and may even be important, no one will ever get to experience the unique relationship between you and your ideas that formed and grew in those late nights, early morning hours.