Microsoft Word, especially as designed for macs, sucks. Not only does it suck lemons, it also sucks eggs. Runny, yellow eggs. For one thing, my version of Word has the weirdest, oddest bug that runs like this: I open a new document. I write a bunch of pages (let's say 38, because that's the # of shitty, illegible, verbose, vague, convoluted pages that I have so-called written in my current chapter). I get to about page 23 by scrolling around aimlessly, since that's what I do most of the time while I am writing, and realize that I had better put page numbers into the document because I am getting completely lost, dizzy, and discombobulated because I have no guideposts. So, I insert pages, as a normal person working in Word does to their multi-paged manifesto. Well, my computer is on a very expensive form of page number cocaine. It starts inserting pages, blank ones, by the thousands in between page 23 and 38 (the end of the document). You have to hit Ctrl+Command+Shift (or something like that) to get it to stop. I kid you not. So, I wind up with a document that is 23,423 pages long. It is seriously insane. It is so aggravating because to get from page 23 to 38, you have to s-c-r-o-l-l-l-l-o-r-c-s-c-s-ll through the thousands of pages that have been inserted! Oh my marbles.
The good news is that this inane computer mystery usually results in one of my favorite angry human activities, which is slamming my hands as hard as I possibly can onto my keyboard, in a fit of rage only matched by the times I have jumped on top of my printer with boots on while waiting for some lame worksheet on how to differentiate the verb ensure from assure for a writing class with only ten minutes to spare before the blasted class starts. "Printer jammed." Blink blink blink. "Printer jammed." Yeah, fuck off, Hewlett. And you, too, Packard. With all these geniuses like Steve Jobs in the world, why is it that printers and photocopiers (oh, don't get me even started) suck so much? Oh yeah, and Word for macs.
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But actually, let's just face it, it's not really Word's fault, it's really my brain's fault that I hate my dissertation. I write these paragraphs that belong in the Introduction to the entire project, not the current chapter. Those are frequent. Then, I write sentences like this, "It seems to me that it could be very apparent that in the 1920s there may have been a tendency to write what could be called poetry..." Dammit all, Tara. Say what the hell it is you want to say and cut out the beating around the bush. Or I write, "As I will elaborate further..." which is code for, "I am too fucking lazy to talk about this b.s. right now, or ever, so please just remember this chapter as if I spoke eloquently about this certain concept that totally eludes me and always will." And then my favorite is my shorthand, "xyz" which stands in for, "information that will never be inserted but instead just deleted before I hand this into my advisor, or maybe, never."
Oh, and I also have this recurring nightmare that secret thoughts I have write themselves into my document without me even knowing it. I mean, stranger things have happened. So, I'm afraid that I hand it in and someone (haha. who am I kidding? The only person who reads this shit is my poor advisor who tries to be nice to me even though I know she secretly thinks, "How did I wind up with this insane girl who cannot construct a basic argument and clearly knows nothing about that which she writes?") reads something like, "God, I fucking hate this project and wish that Dwinelle burned down" or worse . . .It's the same way I sometimes wonder if I am mentally deranged and the whole world knows it but no one will tell me, so whereas I think I am doing a Ph.D., I have, in reality, been in a mental institution for the last seven years, and everyone just nods their head and tells me what I want to hear while conducting meetings that assess my "limited mental capacities" behind closed doors. Tragically-comically, the difference between the loony bin and academia has become more and more indiscernible with each passing year...
I also just have to ask the obvious question: Has anyone besides Heidegger, Hegel, Judith Butler and probably one or two annoying loser phenoms I have met at Berkeley ever written a good dissertation? I mean these things are just plain awful. Let's face it. After seven, eight, ten, twelve years of learning, we really lack eloquence, sophistication, precision, and well, knowledge. When it's all said and done, the best we can hope for, girls and boys of your thirties, is this gem of a comment: "If you wish to publish this interesting draft, you should research more deeply, expand ideas, reformulate argument, rethink topic, and well, possibly just start over. Have you considered the world beyond academia? I hear there is a lot out there for people like you. Of course, I myself have no idea what's out there since I was born this way. But news creeps in from the other side...and there are possibilities for you."
On that note..I think, if I may, I propose, I surmise, I interrogate, I argue, I postulate, I pontificate, I contradict, I believe, I sort of have this kind of idea...that it is time to put this cursed MacBook and all her unnecessary words down...at least until tomorrow.
Insert page #: 32,987.
p.s. I just read this over and have to say, for better or worse, once in a great while, I crack myself the hell up.
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