My brain is hurting a lot from spending a morning making decisions like, �Do I put one or two spaces between sentences?� and consulting the One True Bible of every dissertator, The Chicago Manual of Style. Oy.

Actually, this is exactly how I felt when I was planning my wedding. I don�t care how the napkins are folded. I don�t care which kind of silverware is on the table. I don�t care whether tablecloths are white or ivory. I don�t care. I don�t care. I DON�T CARE!

Ahem.

Let me just interrupt this rant to remind myself for just a minute that in this particular case, the dissertation secretary does care and the dissertation secretary (who in my mind is an elderly woman in cat eye glasses and a navy blue polyester double-knit dress who speaks very softly most of the time but is given to unexpected outbursts of rage in which she might hurl her mug of tea at the nearest passerby) stands between me and the letters P H and D.

On the plus side, I�ve discovered that I can use Amazon�s �search inside the book� feature to chase down page numbers missing in my footnotes. The lazy woman�s guide to research. And don�t worry, I check it in an actual book too. I�m not that lazy. But it just now saved me skimming through pages one through forty-nine of A Room of One�s Own in search of a quote about missing women writers/artists on page fifty.

I�ve also discovered that I might need to update my copy of the Dissertator�s Bible. Page 635 offers a photo of a person typing at a computer the size of a Mini Cooper with a caption that reads, �The operator of this video display terminal can check input as it is recorded or call it back for subsequent �editing.� At the left are two floppy disks.� It�s actually good that they clarified the floppy disks, because they are roughly the size of bathmats. And now I must wallow in nostalgia for our family�s first computer, the Apple II+ on which I used to whoop my brother�s ass at Space Invaders and print out my lame attempts at code on our jumbo jet of a dot matrix printer. Those were the days.

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