FW: Epiphanies

So last night while I was trying to write out the methodology for my senior paper (which methodology I would turn in today). I was doing it with about 2 hours and 40 minutes of sleep from the night before, as well as a grand accumulation of sleep deprivation from the last couple of months. I was somehow still awake, I think by virtue of the fact that I took too many Excedrin, trying to chisel out the methodology for what I realized would be a flawed, futile work. I have always been into dialects and sociolinguistics, but this paper was going to be over an alternate etymology of an epithet referring to residents of the Appalachian and Ozark Mountains. I realized, though, that all the supporters of my argument love to recur to "17th century documents" to back up their claims, yet these documents were nowhere to be found. Seriously, I found no viable proof to back up the claim. It dawned on me that if I tried to pass this off as a senior paper, I would basically be the laughingstock of the linguistic community.
It suddenly hit me what I should write about. It is kind of late to revamp my entire paper, but hey, I have taken similar action before (like for English 312). I decided to pursue a topic that has really intrigued me, especially since no dialectologist or sociolinguist has written about this yet. It has to do with the way native North American English speakers are now starting to pronounce certain consonants intervocalically. As I reviewed this idea with my TA today, he said that it would be a great step into my desired field if I could get my study published. He said that nearly any MA program would accept me because of it, and many PhD programs would highly consider me also. This would be the beginning of a dream come true. I want to teach what I love on the university level one day, preferably somewhere back East.
I know this will bore everyone who reads it, but it is on my mind right now, so I figured I could write about it better than anything else at the moment.