After a week of writer's block, anxiety, temper tantrums, desperate phone calls home to my poor mother venting my frustration, questioning my existence, pestering my professors, seriously considering changing my major, slowly losing my sanity, burying myself in deep, unanswerable questions of theology, petitioning/begging God for some kind of answer--I have FINALLY come up with a relevant thesis about George Herbert's poetry that I believe in and care to write about and (dare I say it?) LOVE.


This is satisfaction and happiness.  Don't you love it when you work so hard for something, push yourself to the edge of your ability, and then when you're almost sure you will fail, suddenly things come together?!!!! Then you look back and think, "Woah, that was rough, but I could do it again," and then you keep moving forward in life so you end up having those experiences over and over and over, whether they be intellectual, spiritual, or physical.  


Refinement.