Maria Brumm at Green Gabbro lists the five emotions of thesis-writing. They are: despair, frustration, irritability, relief, and robot. Brumm is partial to "robot." "It's what I feel when I'm working effectively, a sort of detached contentment mixed in with cheerful bleeps and bloops whenever I finish a computation," she blogs. Her readers add "joy," since sometimes that happens -- however occasionally.