Over at Anggarrgoon, “Claire”:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/anggarrgoon/2004/03/23#a63 is worried about losing the hidden benefits of graduate school.

bq. I finished my dissertation today. … What excuse will I use now when I try to eat cereal with a fork? or have no clean clothes? or when I eat porridge for dinner? probably that I’m making the most of it before I stop being a grad student and have to be respectable… , dissertations are so useful….

Here’s a true story. When I was reading that a few hours ago, all the talk of food made me kinda hungry. So I headed over to the kitchen, washed a bowl, pulled out the cereal box, and then looked at the clock and realised a bowl of cardboard-flavoured cereal wasn’t what I needed at that time of day. But had I not noticed the clock, I think I’d think that being an academic would have been a pretty good excuse in the circumstances. So provided the job market for Australian linguists is as strong as it should be, Claire will have all the excuses she needs for a long long time.

More seriously, congratulations to Clare on finishing the thesis. I wonder how many people there are so far who have finished a PhD while maintaining an academic blog?