Yes, I'm better today.
Thank you all for your kind interest. I am much better today.
Although I have a feeling that this bitterness will linger through 11th week.
Worked on my paper today and actually got so frustrated with scrolling up and down on multiple Word documents that I printed them all out and attacked with scissors and tape. I now have a 7.5 foot long ribbon of paper which has to be re-converted into a word document. On the up side, I think that it actually now conveys something similar to a coherent argument (albeit with rather large gaps that need to be filled in with random historical content). This all comes from trying to conceptually expand an already written 10 page presentation / conference paper into a 20 page paper with the minimum amount of work possible (note: that approach fails - plan to do more work than if you started from scratch). This all occurred after I sat down in a coffeehouse to work and simply wrote across the top page "this makes no orginizational sense" [note to students: this is a bad sign].
It is, however, aesthetically pleasing to have this rope-o-paper lying across my floor. I can quite literally walk through my argument. I can cut and paste. I can doodle in the margins. I can create a game of hopscotch on the back. I can measure my apartment in paper-lengths. I can even wrap my paper around me as a protective cloak and pretend that I am some kind of Blithedale/folklore superhero here to protect the world from free-floting evil released by Jamesean magical narratives (this seriously makes sense if you read my paper - which indicates, perhaps, how inappropriate my topic is and how utterly hopeless my approach seems at the moment)
At least I have all weekend to work on this. After rendering ribbons to text tomorrow I will be poised (catlike) to pounce upon the gaps, bat around the transitions, rip apart irrelevant digressions, and generally drop useful historical knowledge into my argument. If this fails I will curl up in a ball and sleep.
Although I have a feeling that this bitterness will linger through 11th week.
Worked on my paper today and actually got so frustrated with scrolling up and down on multiple Word documents that I printed them all out and attacked with scissors and tape. I now have a 7.5 foot long ribbon of paper which has to be re-converted into a word document. On the up side, I think that it actually now conveys something similar to a coherent argument (albeit with rather large gaps that need to be filled in with random historical content). This all comes from trying to conceptually expand an already written 10 page presentation / conference paper into a 20 page paper with the minimum amount of work possible (note: that approach fails - plan to do more work than if you started from scratch). This all occurred after I sat down in a coffeehouse to work and simply wrote across the top page "this makes no orginizational sense" [note to students: this is a bad sign].
It is, however, aesthetically pleasing to have this rope-o-paper lying across my floor. I can quite literally walk through my argument. I can cut and paste. I can doodle in the margins. I can create a game of hopscotch on the back. I can measure my apartment in paper-lengths. I can even wrap my paper around me as a protective cloak and pretend that I am some kind of Blithedale/folklore superhero here to protect the world from free-floting evil released by Jamesean magical narratives (this seriously makes sense if you read my paper - which indicates, perhaps, how inappropriate my topic is and how utterly hopeless my approach seems at the moment)
At least I have all weekend to work on this. After rendering ribbons to text tomorrow I will be poised (catlike) to pounce upon the gaps, bat around the transitions, rip apart irrelevant digressions, and generally drop useful historical knowledge into my argument. If this fails I will curl up in a ball and sleep.
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