Grad school blues

Title's extremely cliche I know. But I have to dump this in a blog post because no one wants to hear how depressed I am right now.
After pouring a year of my life into my master's thesis it is finally done. A year of trying to balance family life with scholarship and very little direction. One hundred eight pages using three pages of bibliographic entries totalling thousands of pages of research.
If I was a superstitious person I'd almost say someone was trying to stop me from finishing. On Tuesday of last week my computer died, windows just decided not to boot up and if I ever had a backup disc to reload the OS I don't know what happened to it. Our laptop also decided that the power socket wasn't going to work anymore either. Luckily my wife borrowed a new one so I was able to keep working. Of course, I had to move to the kitchen table and our hard wooden kitchen chairs. Then we went to the in-laws for Thanksgiving and somehow I was able to find time to work there. A first, and I actually finished the last chapter there. It felt great to have overcome the obstacles. I spent most of yesterday editing and making the preliminary pages. Then we took a roadtrip to print out copies for each board member and deliver them to campus. It was raining, we put the copies in a plastic bag inside my backpack to keep them dry. I run up to the department building and what do you know but the doors are locked. Ugh. We pulled around so I could drop off some books at the library and I saw the lights on in the other side of the building. I decided to make a second effort and yeah! it was open.
This kind of is the story of my life, things always work out but never the way you expect and there are always additional obstacles placed in the way just to make things interesting.
So we finally get home after spending alllllllll day with this. Then I get an email from my advisor. As usual it is so ambiguous I don't know what to think. My wife mailed him the three chapters I had finished and edited after he told me it was unreadable. Yeah. So he says the writing is improved but now has issues with my content and argument. He considers what I dropped off, after a year of struggle, a first draft. But I am scheduled to defend it next Monday.
So, say by some miracle it is just good enough to pass. And another miracle I am able to defend my work just enough to get him to sign off on it. And by some other miracle I am able to get the special paper to print out a perfect copy to give to the graduate school for binding and cataloging in the library. I already screwed everything up enough that my name won't be in the commencement book and I don't even want to buy another cap and gown to do the ceremony. I just want to get the stupid piece of paper, no party, no celebration, just get it over with.
Burned out, that is how I feel right now. The year I spent on the project was the culmination of five previous years training and preparing for this. What's next? I need to recover for a while before even considering a doctoral program.
That means I get to compete with all the other lab rats for some menial job with no benefits or job security. yippee. Maybe I'll feel better tomorrow. Tomorrow's a new day right? After all this crap, there has to be a payoff. There just has to be something. So, maybe tomorrow I'll have the strength to crop back some of the gloom and get back to it. Here's to hope!