This little ditty from Modern Mechanix is confusing. I’m trying to remember EVER seeing a mirror taped to anyone’s desk and I get nothing.

I’m not making light of the real issue, however, which is quite serious. How DO you keep from running out of paper? How did we write all of those foot-noted papers in college without running out of room every single time?

I don’t remember. That was too long ago and I paid my roommate to type up my papers at $2 a page anyway. I was young. Typing papers was about layout perfection and margins and no white-out. Even though I bask in the glory of strikethroughs and fictional hyphenation strategies now, I remember when the whole world was ready to pound and pronounce upon the smallest mistake. Especially marginal mistakes. I didn’t type much back then.

I had an old boyfriend who, for a semester or two, channelled or copied or posed as Jack Kerouac. Or Sal Paradise. Or both. This was a common malady among my English major/poet boyfriends back then, but this one in particular liked to tape all of his pages together, one after the other, a la Kerouac, until he had a mountainous pile of over-inflated ego drivel. That’s how he solved The Problem of the Bottom Margin – no margins at all.

Later, Bob earned a Phd in Medieval Lit, then changed his name and became a rodeo announcer. Just thought I’d throw that in.

I handle the paper problem by cheating a bit with this fabulous lined and numbered legal paper. I just roll it in behind a sheet of perfect 9 lb. onionskin, peer through it, and voila – stop typing when the number “32” rolls up. Easy.

What’s your trick?