Sin-thesizing Your Thesis

IT IS ABOUT THE TIME the sky-blue Macintosh screen begins looking like the color of a mountain climber dead of hypothermia. About the time I realize that my last "15-minute break" allowed me to go to Coffee Connection, run five miles and watch an entire college basketball game. About the time the fan in my hard drive makes me think that evil spirits in my brain are yelling at me. About the time I dream that Marion Barry reads my thesis about him, hates it, escapes from jail and is scouring Cambridge with a butcher knife looking for me.

All whining to the contrary, I think the agonies of the thesis may be greatly exaggerated. Sure, it is agonizing writing on a computer for days at a time. Sure, the boredom of organizing notes and typing in quotes makes the thought of sitting through 12 hours of statistics lectures seem tolerable. And there is always a non-thesis writing roommate to play with, or a meal to be lingered at, or an intramural basketball game to lose.

I offer here a new paradigm for doing the thesis. Any senior who masters it and takes it to heart will have a much better time than the rest of us, and will probably graduate summa, win a Hoopes prize and get into Harvard Law School.

First, an outline of the problem. Where I think most thesis-writing seniors get in trouble is not in our poor planning, though there's plenty of that. Where we get screwed is in the actual obsession with the object itself. It becomes "It." It excuses all other things, and replaces all other things. For example, though I have no plans for next year, I have told myself I shouldn't think about jobs and fellowships until March 19. Or I have forbidden myself from bemoaning my hypothetical love life on the grounds that as long as I am writing a thesis, the fact that it is only hypothetical is preferable. (This is, of course, a lie. I bemoan my hypothetical love life at least two hours every day.)

As an "It," the thesis is all-consuming. Being monumentally single-minded helps if you really are making a contribution to the intellectual life of the world, but since most of us are just trying to write 100 pages without plagiarizing anyone famous, this It-centrism makes formerly happy, normal lives into frightening things.

WHILE NOT exactly a solution to the problem of "It," the Plotz Paradigm certainly offers a way to make life more fun.

Hegel, a great German philosopher whom I have been lucky enough to avoid reading, came up with the concept of dialectism. As I misunderstand it, Hegel sees a world with ideas in constant conflict: an original idea or state of existence (called the "thesis") automatically leads to the development of its own contradiction (called the "anitithesis"). The thesis and antithesis, after struggling with each other, form the "synthesis." Great Thinkers love this idea. Marx, Levi-Strauss an similar types found Great Truths in this idea of Hegel.

I DON'T CARE about Hegel. My thesis is about Marion Barry, and the closest I get to Hegel is the German restaurant where I interviewed a friend of Barry. But this concept of thesis, antithesis and synthesis seems a very powerful tool.

In the paradigm, the thesis is the "thesis." All work on the thesis that contributes to its final written structure--such as research, writing and editing--counts as "thesis." Work on the thesis that is done to avoid real work on the thesis, such as deciding on the font, playing with margins, putting notes into 18 new piles, compiling the bibliography, or typing in written outlines--does not count as "thesis."

Antithesis, or "Anti-thesis," is everything I do to avoid doing my thesis. My antithetical list includes, but is in no way limited to: watching "Spinal Tap" again, buying soap, shopping classes, revising my resume, running, writing long letters to people I am no longer friends with, watching "Spinal Tap" again, doing recommended reading for classes, revising my bibliography, writing papers for other classes and xeroxing articles I will never read.

The problem for most seniors is these two are all that exist. You do your thesis. Then, to a void it, you do your anti-thesis. Pleasure, instead of being pleasure, is the avoidance of pain. Avoidance of thesis equals avoidance of pain, so all anti-thesis, most of which consists of boring and unpleasant tasks for other classes, seems good. Anti-thesis is, of course, not good. It is the same crap that you would do if you would do if you were not doing your thesis; "It" is just so evil that anything looks good in comparison.

What is missing is the synthesis, or "sinthesis" as I prefer to call it. The formula is exactly Hegelian. You do your thesis. It drives you crazy, so you avoid it with anti-thesis. Together thesis and anti-thesis explode in a giant ball of fire that, if you're lucky, leaves you with sin-thesis.

DRINK UNTIL you see three Macintosh screens. Smoke enough crack to make Marion Barry's drug habit look like a day at the beach. Have sex, lots of sex, in many different places, in many different positions--and preferably with many different people of many different genders and species. Steal. Covet. Lust. commit adultery. dishonor your father and mother (the best method is to tell them about all the guilt they made you feel as a child). And, if necessary, kill-roommates, advisors, cheerful juniors, people who finished their theses a month early are all legitimate targets. Sin is everything you'd hope it would be, only more fun.

Of course I write this in The Crimson on a Thursday evening when my two, non-thesis writing roommates voyage to a bar in Boston to drink themselves silly. But I am a Social Studies concentrator, and if there is anything that has taught me, it is that in fun, as in everything, theory is always better than practice.