From time to time, you glance up from your computer and think a stranger is someone else. Sometimes you feel a pang of melancholy when this happens. “Oh that’s silly,” you think to yourself, “He could never be here.” And that reminder to yourself has the potential to trigger a whole series of other pangs: “I wonder what they’re all doing now;” “I wonder when I’ll see them next;” “I wonder if they’re thinking of me.” You haven’t known anyone in your current city for more than a few years.

Anyway, back to it. That’s not productive. In fact, that kind of daydreaming has the potential to be destructive. Regardless of how you feel about where you are in life, you must finish inputting those grades today.

Oh no, now you’re thinking about your own transcript. How much effort is necessary to get the grade that gets the [insert external funding here]? You can slack off in that [Research Methods] class and get an A+ but you’ll have to really work hard for an A in that [Canadian Studies] class.

Cranky neo-Marxists in that [Political Economy] class easily convinced you of the “need to locate and open points for political intervention” (Barnet, 2002: 25) through hypertext. But unlike the party poopers of the hypertextuality of everyday life, you felt blue-skied about the ability for users [of the technology] to “leap tall hierarchies at the blink of phosphor” (Barnet, 2002: 25).