Footnotes are overrated

I've spend the last week "thinking" about my dissertation (which I've also spent the last 18 months doing...which is why it's done in my head but not yet on paper).  We started school this week which has meant that the last two weeks have been dominated by organizational bootcamp.  I trained two new teaching assistants, taught our department how to work the new online component linked to our book, taught myself how to use the one linked to second year courses, discovered the bookstore ordered the wrong books for my upper division class, didn't order enough for our first year classes, and that half of my second year students have been on a two year break from Italian.  Lovely.

So today I finally made my way to a coffee shop (by way of Staples and my office) and have officially written two pages and four footnotes.  But here's my issue: footnotes are overrated.  I get them in theory: it's information that you want to include but is not directly pertinent to what you're discussing.  So then shouldn't I leave it out?  Or put it in the next paragraph or chapter or whatever?  I have a professor at UNC that says a good paper is half writing half footnotes.  No.  That is a very unorganized writer I think.  One semester we read the Decameron and it came as a two book set: one was the primary text and the other was the notes.  How many people do you think read the notes?  I've used that set at least four times in my academic career and it's only this last time that I opened the notes and do you know why?  Because I couldn't be bothered to reread the primary text!  And here's the thing, if you have a decent professor (and if you don't you shouldn't be taking that class from them anyway) they tell you everything that's in those notes!  And then they tell you what they think about it....and then you discuss what you think about them.  So why do I need to put them into this dissertation that no one other than my parents and my dissertation committee is ever going to read?!

Now the real question: should I run for Miss Texas United States?  I can't decide if i should bite the bullet and enter at-large to run in the state pageant or if I should wait till the Spring and have a go at a local.  Decisions, decisions.  Clearly I need to sort out my priorities (can you name the movie that comes from?  If you can I'll give you a footnote in my dissertation).