Endnote = Evil

Having spent the last six hours attempting to get OneSearch citations to download into my Endnote database, I can officially say I have wasted the entire morning. I'm going to spend the next six hours retyping each one. Academia feels like a tedious, technologically-impossible suckfest today, so I'm going to take a moment to meditate on one of my favorite quotes from my readings yesterday:

"There are two principal ways in which reflective human beings try, by placing their lives in a larger context, to give sense to those lives. The first is by telling the story of their contribution to a community. This community may be the actual historical one in which they live, or another actual one, distant in time or place, or a quite imaginary one, consisting perhaps of a dozen heroes and heroines selected from history or fiction or both. The second way is to describe themselves as standing in an immediate relation to a non-human reality. This relationship is immediate in the sense that it does not derive from a relation between such a reality and their tribe, or their nation, or their imagined band of comrades. I shall say that stories of the former kind exemplify the desire for solidarity, and that stories of the latter kind exemplify the desire for objectivity." -- Richard Rorty

Though I don't agree with Rorty on everything, and though we could always problematize the project of binaries, this speaks with nice clarity to a powerful (constructed or not) division. Since I've alternated between spending my life with revolutionaries, then law students -- or with activists, then academics -- I'm always wishing for a way to break down what feels like a very real barricade between these conceptions. Solidarity!