Painful, I should say, not so much for you the reader as for me the writer.

Here's what I've accomplished, work-wise, in the last few days:

• Final edits for Ch. 2 (completely and totally done)
• Final edits for Ch. 3 (need to check approx. 6 citations when I return to Major Eastern City, but otherwise done)
• Composed "Acknowledgements" section
• Started transforming my "working bibliography" into its final form
• Spent three hours in the local research university hunting down citations for chapters 1-3

So, all in all, lots of hugely tedious and time-consuming work that, although necessary, hasn't exactly felt rewarding.

It was fun going to Local U today, though, and spending some time in its lovely library. Despite being one of the west coast's largest academic libraries, housed in an ivy-covered American Collegiate Gothic structure, the stacks are completely open to the public; you don't even need to show a driver's license, much less academic credentials, to wander on up and look at whatever you please. And the aging hippie staff members (all of them seemingly bearded, long-haired, and sporting interesting beret-like headgear) are a delight: wacky and funny but very helpful. The collections are also extremely well-signed and well-ordered--frankly, better-ordered than INRU's collections.

I grew up in the shadow of the U, and when I was in high school it represented the sum total of what I knew or could conceive about the academy. Both my parents were first-generation college grads, and I knew no one, but no one who had ever attended a better school than the U. The U was where the smarter kids from my high school went. The U had nationally-ranked athletic teams. The U was in the hip part of town, where all the used bookstores and art-house movie theatres and tatoo parlors were. It's where my friends and I went on weekends as soon as we got our driver's licenses and could get the hell out of the suburbs.

And in some ways it's still what academia is to me, and it may be why I wound up choosing INRU rather than a liberal arts college: college, to the eighteen-year-old me, meant something urban, diverse, big, and exciting. And although I now have virtually no friends left on the west coast, if there were a job in my field at the U, and they wanted me, I'd be there in a heartbeat.