Crashed and certainly burned

I had a big presentation today in my Urbanization class on my MA thesis proposal and boy did it suck...I think. I was really nervous about the whole thing and had been in such a high state of anxiety for over a week now that I couldnt do anything else but work on it--I ignored pretty much everything else I had to do. Did the fact that the professor of this class is also my reader (the person who sort of will oversee the writing of the thesis) make it worse? Or that I would be talking about subject that is near and dear to my heart? Perhaps. All I know was that I had a huge block sitting right in my stomach...a nasty block of anxiety, nervousness and any other icky emotion having to do with performance and standing up in front of people.

So I was chugging along through the presentation when Ed interrupted me and basically told me that I was just talking and not actually arguing a point. He critiqued a few things, saying it was all good to give a historical background and to dance through all the theory and such but that I needed to bring in or relate it back to an argument. And as he was talking I almost kinda wanted, almost did, cry cause here I was in the middle of my big presentation and here he was saying not so nice (though couched very nicely) things and I felt it was kinda unfair. I was really just at the point where I was going to bring in everything together--okay not technically everything cause this is just a really rough beginning so its impossible to bring everything in--when he interrupted.

But once that happened and I concluded, he did sort of backtrack off his critique and applied it to everyone ("you must have an argument!). We spoke a little more after class and smoothed some things out. I reiterated that this was just a rough beginning, that once more research is done I will tighten my focus more, just because the topic Im working with (which I promise will be better revealed later once I have it written concretely) and he seemed okay with that and in turn suggested a few pointers.

Still, I cant help but feel a little down about the whole affair. Im all confused....did I do okay, and was it a coherent presentation? We'll never know...

Eve