When Charlie Brown was sad or mad or stressed out, he was often depicted with a little gray storm cloud over his head. It didn't matter what the weather was like everywhere else in Peanuts-land; for Charlie, it was always raining.

If I look up at the space immediately above my head and squint, I can kind of see the same little cloud. Two weeks, I chant under my breath. Two weeks. Like a magic spell or a mantra, or the time left until some creepy wet-haired chick comes out of the TV and kills me. Two weeks.

The majority of my classmates and I are in the last throes of our thesis writing, but like John McCain, I could easily see us in the same spot for 100 years. The time goes interminably slow unless you have a deadline and then it disappears, speeding away in the wake of YouTube mashups, Facebook status changes, and the vast unholy realms of the Interwebs. It's even worse for those of us who are writing our theses on YouTube or Facebook or, God forbid, MySpace; where does the research end and the procrastination begin?

It's been four months. Our social lives have been reduced to instant messages and the occasional meet-up in the lab or at the lounge. We exchange text messages at the library, or smile wearily at one another over paper cups filled with enough caffeine to kill a squirrel. I vaguely remember a phenomenon called "happy hour," filled with pleasant conversation that got more erudite the more we filled up our glasses with cheap beer. We could barely hear each other over the thumping bass of crappy bar music, but somehow we understood.

My computer screen fills up every waking moment. I had a dream I was doing a rhetorical criticism of the NCAA tournament, but then Georgetown and my alma mater lost and it didn't matter anymore. Does my thesis matter anymore? Tens of thousands of words, dozens of pages, but am I really saying anything?

Maybe. I know that in two weeks, I'll be proud of whatever it is I'm writing. I know that somehow I'll know enough about this topic to talk about it for 20 minutes, and then, God willing, I'll be able to answer questions about it. Afterwards, though, I will be Done, and the storm cloud will evaporate and the skies will open up. A light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and someone somewhere will miss a 3AM phone call because they're sleeping the sleep of the finished.

But for now, for these last two interminable, lightning-quick weeks, I'll just quote my man Charlie Brown: "ARRRGHH!"