On nearly failing Mr. Bologna's gym class

It didn't seem possible, but there it was: another email about a blink-and-you'd-miss-it formatting problem with my dissertation. Not something mentioned in the last round of edits, but maybe alluded to? Something about how I needed to fix the problems and do X, but phrased in such a way as it seemed likely that doing X was what would solve the problem. Maybe (definitely!) I ought to have phoned the office then, but I thought I'd made all the changes, or else obviously I'd have called to check. But anyway. Everything seems to be sorted out such that I don't need to make a special trip into the city just to deal with this, but that's not to say there wasn't a moment of panic when I saw the email pop up from the Office of Your Dissertation is Formatted Wrong.

This brings ABD to a new level. I can understand never really getting going with a project, or finding a job elsewhere and not seeing the point of getting the degree, or just generally something coming up between the qualifying exam and the defense. But if what stands between me and the doctorate is that two lines of the title page are incorrectly spaced, I think I'm a walking don't-go article.

In other news, my high school called to let me know that I did in fact fail Mr. Bologna's gym class, not just for one marking period, but for the whole year, thereby preventing me from starting college. My elementary school has land-line phoned me up to tell me that the remedial handwriting class I was in (which I was; this blog is basically a celebration of typing) hasn't ended. Whichever other anxiety-dream scenarios, those too, while we're at it.