Thesis Beginnings

I have until early-mid May to submit my thesis. It should be somewhere between 60-110 pages (excluding appendices, etc.). While it has been making me nervous since I started at Cornell, I am beginning to feel on top of the situation. It started with a two-semester seminar series last spring, where we split into small groups in order to read old theses from our program and critique them, looking at what makes a successful thesis.
So, last week I had an adjunct professor in my program giving me crap on my thesis-- why I hadn't gotten it all figured out already, wondering what my plan was, thinking I should have started writing it over the summer. Needless to say, it made me mad. I understand that his goal was to guilt me into action, and make me feel like I am already behind. But, I have been thinking about my thesis all summer and through the start of this semester, and still haven't come to any conclusions on what I want to study, or who I want to advise me for my thesis, so it is difficult to know what to do until these issues are figured out.
I finally experienced a break through this weekend though, and figured out what my thesis topic will be. I think my problem before was that I wasn't really excited about any of my potential topics. I found them interesting-- but not enough to feel willing to commit to a year's worth of research and revision on the topic; at least until now.
As I was thinking about all of the papers that I have written in graduate school so far, I realized that the one I found most interesting was the paper I wrote last fall on torture for my class on ethics and public policy. While I will need to narrow down the specifics of my paper, I have a starting point-- I will be researching how a US policy condoning torture influences the United Nations, and what it means for the International Court of Justice.
I met with my ethics professor from last fall this morning (I am taking a class with him this fall on Intergovernmental Systems) about my research. He knows just about everything on ethics and the US government, and gave me a bunch of ideas on where to go with my research. What was exciting to see was how excited he got about my research topic-- wanting me to come back and let him know how things were going in a couple of weeks, and we could work from there (I think this means I have found an advisor, and I haven't even asked him yet!) on it. He is also letting me write my research paper for him this semester on my thesis topic-- by focusing on how President Bush twisted the intergovernmental system to give himself enough power to allow torture to take place. I will focus on the failures of the check and balances of the legislative and judicial branches.
I am meeting tomorrow with my International Institutions professor to discuss the framing of my thesis topic for the UN, and also to get more ideas from her on where to go from here. The fortunate part of this is that I can also write a paper for her looking at this topic, and will have one chapter of my thesis written through the work I do on the final paper for her class.
We begin our second semester thesis seminar series in a couple of weeks, and I am beginning to realize that I have a lot more established than I thought I might, which is an exciting feeling.
I even spent part of the afternoon in the library, getting books so I can work on furthering my research. I'm excited-- I think this should be good.