EvilJulie.com

*actual line spoken by Hawkeye to Hot Lips in the pilot of M*A*S*H.

So Janice is a genius. (Say that three times fast, and I guarantee in the end you’ll be doing the conga. Janice is a gen-ius! Janice is a gen-ius!) In this comment right here, she suggested that I turn on captions while watching M*A*S*H. This had not occurred to me, mostly because I never use the captions. Because I am stupid. If I miss something, I might rewind the movie several times, and if I don’t catch it? I just let it go. Seriously, it had never occurred to me to switch on the captions.

But last night, I did, and GAME CHANGER! I was only watching episodes of the TV series last night, and while the captions are occasionally a little off, missing a word or so that I guess didn’t appear in the script, it made transcription So. Much. Easier. (Why yes, I am trying to use every possible method to convey emphasis in type. Emphasis does not come in just one kind, people. It’s a rainbow.)

I only made it through three eps last night, and they were all relatively early in the series (pilot episode, episode three, and one from the second season), but I can’t believe how totally misogynistic they were. The movie, yes, I knew the movie was misogynistic, but when I was little, I had a crush on Hawkeye and totally wished he would pay attention to me like he was to those nurses, because he was so cute! (Give me a break, this was ages 5-13, I didn’t know any better.) But last night, I was watching it thinking “Jesus, Hawkeye is a complete ass to those women. And so is Trapper.” (I might have had a crush on Trapper at a young age as well.) “And goddamn are they mean to Hot Lips, she hasn’t done anything to deserve this kind of treatment.” Ah, the distance between a 70s/80s dramedy and someone who came of age in the age of political correctness. I still enjoy the show, it’s still funny, but it’s got an edge to it that I never noticed before and will probably never miss again. It’s a good thing Alan Alda’s real feelings about women surfaced in the character of Hawkeye in later seasons and he stopped being such a bastard.

Piece of advice: when looking for paper topics, remember that you will have to examine your subject critically, even if it was a cherished part of your childhood, and bear in mind that this could ruin it for you. Choose subjects accordingly.

I was very proud of myself, thinking up watching M*A*S*H for my term paper. The one thing that I hadn’t counted on was the note taking process. With books, you highlight or copy and paste, or whatever. With a movie, you have to rewind over and over again to get the lines transcribed perfectly. This wouldn’t be a problem with most movies whose scripts are available online. However, since it’s a Robert Altman film, there was a lot of improv, and the script available online bears little relation to what was happening on the screen in the end.

I have seven pages of notes, and although the film is only 116 minutes, it took me about three and a half hours to watch the whole thing. Still massively entertaining, and better than reading a monograph, but not as easy as I had thought it would be. And I still have to watch about five episodes. If this were Twitter, I would totally tag this post #firstworldproblems.

From the last post, I see that Vince and I are not alone in this student thing…well, I knew that actually, because I have a ton of friends from Ravelry that are doing advanced degrees now, too, probably because of the economy. But anyway, I realized that there are a lot of us for whom the online learning portion of our degrees is brand new. I did an MFA about ten years ago, and at that point the computer was still just for typing your papers and procrastinating, and not a lot in between. When I started this MA last fall, I was amazed to see how far the internet has come. I can literally sit in my jim-jams at 3 AM and do legitimate research on the computer. For my M*A*S*H historiographical essay alone, I downloaded about 12 PDFs of articles from various sources, and you would be amazed at the primary source material for Vietnam that is also available on the web. Additionally, several of my profs have utilized a program called Blackboard to post readings for our classes, either in the form of PDF of eBook. Ten years ago, that stuff would have been a thick course pack of xeroxes from our campus printer. It’s kind of incredible, if you think about it, but people who grew up with this kind of learning (like my pseudostepkids) are just blase about it, and those of us who grew up before it often have no idea about what’s out there.

Today, my fellow students, I give you a time-saving present that one of my classmates gave me. It’s called BibMe.org, and while that sounds dirty, it is in fact, awesome. Basically, it generates bibliographies for you in most of the research format (MLA, APA, Chicago Manual of Style, etc.). You either enter the publication information about the sources you use manually or use BibMe’s search feature to locate the information, then tell it which format you want to use, and it generates your bibliography for you, which can then be exported to Word. Now, it has its shortcomings, mainly because it’s pretty meat and potatoes. It does not account for any fancy circumstances, like editor as author, or issue number only (rather than volume). But what I’ve done for both of the papers I’ve been working on this weekends is this: enter the basic stuff on BibMe (or use the search feature, which works better for books than for journal articles), generate a basic bibliography, and then export it to Word and tweak for the fancy circumstances there. It is not a miracle worker, but it is a time-saver, and I think I love it. Maybe you will, too.

I was one of those kids who was in love with my own handwriting from a very young age (I say this like it’s a common phenomena. It is, right?). I sometimes think I started writing stories just because it allowed me to fill up whole pages with my handwriting. To this day, even though so much of my job is handwritten, I still feel that way. I take my class notes by hand, even now that I have the option of using a laptop. I have always taken notes and written outlines for papers out, and I have a stack of 5″x7″ index cards for the express purpose of doing Thesis, Argument, Structure, Evidence summaries for each source I use when I write papers.

Last night, a bit pressed for time, I decided it would be faster to just type all of my notes into Word. I got a sense of accomplishment out of it that I hadn’t expected and was really jazzed when I realized that I had eleven pages of notes, double spaced, and the paper itself was only supposed to be five pages, double spaced. This morning, I realized something even more awesome. By taking my notes on the computer last night, I had put myself into the mode of phrasing the concepts as I might do in the paper. Which meant, of course, that I could just copy and paste those things directly into my paper. Obviously, I was never meant for a career in rocket science since it took me this long to figure out something so completely obvious, but oh my god, INSTANT FIRST DRAFT!!! Well, maybe not instant, since I still had to write the connections between the sources I was discussing as well as an intro and conclusion, but pretty damned close to instant! And that is how I started “writing” my first draft at 9:00 this morning and have a first draft done at 4:oo, even with food breaks and a subsequent America’s Next Top Model break.

Because of the way the question I was writing about it phrased (as in, it’s about two completely different aspects of slavery), I will have to really make the intro and conclusion work, but the rough draft was done in seven hours, and it’s onto the top of the seventh page. I can’t remember the last time I wrote a paper that went over the page limit set by the professor, or when I had a rough draft completed a week and a half before it was due (I think the reason for that is because neither one has ever happened.) I am feeling very accomplished, and totally guilt-free about going to the Lincoln Center DJ performance tonight. I just hope I can keep this roll up for the rest of the weekend, because it will make our trip to see Amelia at Harvard next weekend so much more enjoyable if all I have to worry about are minor tweaks.