I've spent the past couple weeks writing a chapter of my thesis, and in doing so I've made a number of observations.

One, I have an officemate who talks a lot. Like, A lot.

Two, I have another officemate who chews really loudly.

Three, thesis-writing increases hearing acuity.

Four, 10,000 words really isn't all that much, even when you're writing a literature review on the topic of musical imagery. What people do when their research is in an area in which more than three decent experiments have actually been done, I don't know.

Five, an early start, morning tea and not even signing into Skype in the first place make all the difference in the world.

Six, if, at any point, you lose track of your carefully-reasoned justification for why your thesis topic is so important that you need to devote three years of your life and many thousands of taxpayer dollars to researching it, DON'T PANIC. Remember that you are a student of psychology - specifically, a student of music cognition. Your research is on the sound that people hear in their heads when they imagine music. 'Because it's cool and I'm curious' is totally an adequate justification.

Seven, proofreading, man. It takes all the pressure off of writing. I can’t believe I made it most of the way through U of T without ever reading over something I had written or even making notes or outlines. Though to be honest, I still don’t really make notes. I expect the last couple weeks would have been much easier if I did. Sometimes I underline or highlight important bits of papers I’ve printed off to read on the train. But usually, if I want to know what was in a paper I read several months ago, I read it again. Is that bad?