#WHY WOULD ANYONE REQUIRE APA WHEN YOU COULD PICK LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE

[fursasaida]

i have spent this week single-mindedly editing this paper (which i had already worked on for 3 weeks prior) and i am in the homestretch. all i have to do is make it 213 words shorter. but that’s after i added like 1500 words to it and cut 1287, or something like that. when you can’t cut any actual substance and you have to just find different phrasings or redundant sentences wherever you can, in an 11,000+ word document where every citation counts toward the wordcount and even this useless citation format’s insistence on saying “p. 285″ instead of just “285″ like a reasonable person would and all those Ps count as words....hell. and the more you’ve successfully cut (over a thousand words already!!) the harder it is to find more little ways to nip and tuck. it took me all day yesterday to get it down from ~700 words over to ~225 over. i will get these last couple hundred words out of here today if it kills me but by god i will hate every second of it

just to zoom out for a second:

i worked on this paper for 3 weeks while also doing arabic class and some union meetings. i spent a lot of time trying to help my incoming student “buddy” with an ICE-induced crisis that almost certainly means she is stuck, unemployed, unable to do remote classes or to get her grad student stipend, in lebanon for at least another year when otherwise she would have been coming here for the fall. i finished the paper. i spent 3 days cleaning my apt, packing up my life, and organizing the temporary move to boston. i met with my advisor about the paper. i have been editing the paper since while trying to adjust to living?? with people??? and getting indigestion from the abrupt change in diet (from: i somehow get enough minimal food into myself to avoid falling down to: my mom makes rich--nutritious, but much more meat and starch heavy--food daily). and now all of a sudden i gotta have a (distanced) social life. and once i’m done with this i have to read a book and edit another paper before the semester starts in like two weeks. you’re probably wondering how i ended up in this situation. buddy, me fuckin too