Dear technology,
I know I complain a lot - about your intermitent "difficulties" - but really, I love you. Dear youtube, thank you for having very helpful video tutorials so that I now know how to make a table of contents. Dear Word, thank you for having a feature in which you generate a table of contents. Dear zotero, at first, we really struggled - English, German, weird formatting defaults - I'm glad we're over that now. You make footnotes so easy, and save me from that pesky black hole that is a straggling ibid.
You are beautiful and I love you.
Yours truly.
it occurred to me that I could be hand-writing my thesis onto paper to then type out on a typewriter. i am so glad that i do not have to do that. my brain is so chaotic - i cut and paste, insert, delete. i currently have 10 word documents and one excel file full of tables and graphs. if this was all hand-written, i would have been crushed under a mountain of books and paper a long time ago.
you are probably tired of hearing about this craziness - but i honestly don't have much else to write about. thesis. books. newspapers. library. its my life right now. i mean, i could tell you about the tourists i overheard in the library... (i would spare you the explitives of course) and how they determined (loudly) that the way to determine what is a *real* university is the swanky-ness of the library. it went something like this: "woah...now this is a library. this is a (expitive) legit school. i mean look at this. this is (explitive) marble." i could also tell you how i resisted the urge to point out the things that drive me crazy about the library:
-dust and weird smells
-under construction (aka loud, sometimes closed off, and recently, areas that smell strongly of paint)
-one bathroom in the basement
-not allowed to bring bags and/or laptop cases
-books arranged according to date purchased by the institution (i miss you and your beautiful decimals, dewey!)
-tourists.
i could tell you about those things, but it might be a mis-representation of what my days actually look like. a two-minute trip downstairs to the bathroom is a small fraction of the time i spend bent over books.
i.am.almost.there.
~love
7 comments:
that is the most ridiculous book organizational system I've ever heard of.
yes. it has been unanimously decided (by me and 3 other people that i asked) that is the the least student-friendly filing system that we have ever heard of. i imagine a conversation that went like this: hey, have you (Sie, of course) ever heard of this guy called Dewey and his decimal system that groups things into categories and topics to aid in finding literature? (High nosed German bureocrat) Hmm, we don't have a form for that. Plus, that sounds like a lot of work. We would rather just keep putting books on shelves as we acquire them. If you want to change it, fill out these 700 forms, file a complaint while standing on your head between the hours of 11 and 12 on the first monday of the month. then we will reject it and put a stamp on it so its official.
haha, so true. I really can't imagine it going it any other way.
Thank goodness Germany is just so "efficient" otherwise, all their quirky ways would just make no sense.... Oh wait.
muhahah - exactly!
Oh Bekah...how my heart pains for you. While I can't imagine using a library organized by date the work was purchased, I find myself wanting to beat the Dewey decimal system over the head. I am in a committed relationship with the Library of Congress system and my little brother's *tiny* college in Florida uses Dewey...shudder.
I find myself only able to talk with friends about my thesis and coursework, think about my thesis and coursework, and otherwise commit my every waking and sleeping moment to my thesis and coursework. I definitely sympathize--we are almost there!
Cheers,
Shawn
haha, gotta love tourists! That's (expletive)hilarious!;) Bekah, love you and praying for you. Light at the end of the tunnel...
@shawn, i can't say i know much about the library of congress system, but if it's a topical system, i'm in! i've had enough of this rediculousness - who puts a book about weimar next to a book about the civil war next to a book on medieval economics next to (you get the idea!) - rediculous! also, i'm glad to know i'm not alone. you can do it friend! (and ps. are you still blogging?)
@michelle, thanks girl! love you, too!
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