Due to my lack of narrative capabilities, the result of a brain-bending morning spent trying to make too little information about suffragists and early American immigration movements seem like enough, today�s entry consists of random observations in bullet point form:

� It�s probably a bad sign when I�m so bored that I can�t read my own dissertation.

� While I generally cannot abide songs that are slightly out of tune in the way I can�t abide fingernails scraping on a chalkboard, for some reason I love the wacky heterophony of Guided by Voices� �I am a Scientist.�

� Everyone should try driving a 15 year-old minivan with the windows rolled all the way down on a warm day while blasting the them to �Wonder Woman� from the stereo. At least once. To optimize the experience, do this while passing your local high school just as school is letting out.

� It is more fun to work in the public library since they�ve decorated the place in preparation for the pirate-themed summer reading program. There�s a Jolly Roger hanging from the ceiling over one side of my desk and a parrot over the other. Yaaarrr!

� Said d�cor may or may not have been responsible for a footnote in which, riffing on a metaphor in a source cited that compares my subjects to sailors adrift at sea after a storm, I suggest that they have more agency and are therefore better described as pirates.

� This footnote will, however, not make it into the dissertation. Unless my committee isn�t reading too carefully.

� It has now become my personal goal to work a pirate reference into my dissertation. Suggestions for how this might be accomplished will be gratefully accepted.

� You don�t have to beg me to stop. I have to get back to work anyway.

� Never write a dissertation.

5 people said it like they meant it