submission of my manuscript has been set back a few days because the boss decided at the last minute he wanted to send it to journal x instead of y -- this necessitated reformatting the abstract and figures, renumbering the references so that they appear in chronological as opposed to alphabetical order, as well as correcting a bunch of other fiddly miscellaneous details (why do journal editors want to know the highest degree conferred on the various authors of submitted papers? shouldn't they be judging the paper on its own merits, as opposed to introducing an unnecessary element of bias? i'm sure it's not because they grant leniency points to lowly educated people such as myself.)

i think i have reached the stage where i'm just heartily sick of this paper. in college i never had the patience to revise my work more than a couple of times, and now that i have to do it i find that i lack the discipline to comb through the manuscript weeding out tiny details that i've missed. i hope this doesn't mean that i'm not of the temperament to do research, because this would be quite a bad time to discover that.