Chocolate, Stat!

I have been spending as much time as I can wrangle (read: a little while the the Sleepy Baby naps on my chest. What? He should be napping in a bassinet or his crib by now? Yeah, well. Moving on. On the positive side, he goes right to sleep at night in his crib. No muss, no fuss. I'm thinking we'll get there for naps eventually.) working on my idea paper.

Yes, you read that right. The stupid paper I thought I had finished in September of '07. And then again sometime in December. And that self-same one that I've been setting weekly goals of getting finished and sent back off for my putative advisor to take his little red track changes keyboard to and electronically bleed all over. So far all I have managed to do is make myself incredibly frustrated and/or depressed.

See...I had this great (I thought) idea. And after looking at it, he said that it was a great idea, but officially there were some flaws*. And so I took a look at the flaws and, after various visions involving voodoo dolls and long, sharp hat pins, I buckled back down and tried to make changes. Only to realize that if he was really serious about the flaws, well, I needed to do some serious idea tweaking. (Yes, t-w-e-a-k-ing.*)

So I have tweaked and tweaked some more and come up with what I think is another (related) good idea, except that in the process of looking for research to try and solidify the worthiness of my idea, I'm pretty sure I've found enough to show that, while it's a great idea, it's a great idea that many other people have already had.

Now I'm not sure what to do. And I didn't get a hollow dark chocolate bunny this year. So I don't even really have a good way to console myself with the fact that if things continue as they are right now, the only letters I'll ever be able to put after my name are ABD. Which, of course, stands for A Big Disappointment.

*Spot the quotes. Hint: Apparently in addition to needing chocolate, I'm channeling Meg Ryan.