Monday, March 13, 2006

One of these things is not like the others - thank goodness!

I just spent about an hour and a half, while also observing a second-semester Tahitian class, attempting to compose a post about fear and adulthood and my current attempts to enter one while leaving the other behind. (I'll leave it to you to decide what I want to do with what.)

I struggled with word choice, paragraph order, and the "main idea" that I wanted to convey. I rewrote the title, rambled in search of a "main idea," lost it, came back to it, changed it, deleted the whole first section...and then it hit me - I wasn't enjoying it! So I gave up.

Now lest you think that I am just a big, selfish, self-serving, instant pleasure-seeking, whining quitter, let me 'splain.

Right now in my life, writing is not relaxing for me. I am, in case you haven't noticed, trying to write my thesis. Nay, let us be positive and confident, even in our complaining. (Let us speak in the third person.) (Let us also use the word "nay" more often.) As our good friend Yoda would say, "Do, or do not. There is no 'try.'"

I AM writing my thesis.

So, like the woman said, I am, in case you haven't noticed, in the process of writing my thesis. And that means doing all of this...

"I struggled with word choice, paragraph order, and the "main idea" that I wanted to convey. I rewrote the title, rambled in search of a "main idea," lost it, came back to it, changed it, deleted the whole first section..."

...all day every day. Or at least, that's what I'm supposed to be doing all day every day. And today, it was kind of frustrating. So then what do I do to relax? I write.

NO! I WRONG!

Don't do, to relax, the same thing that you're supposed to do all day that makes you stressed out! DO. SOMETHING. DIFFERENT. I really thought I learned this lesson a while ago, but apparently I still gots me some larnin' to do, folks.

So the firm unswerving policy of today is that this blog will not be used to post about anything that requires any amount of thought to write about. I will not edit blog posts (except for spelling, because I am just that OCD and 'perfectionalistic,' as Heather said), I will not meditate deeply for hours on end about an appropriate topic about which to post, which will allow me to sound clever and intelligent and deep and inspire lots of people to both change the world and be my new best friend. I will just post. I will just vent. I will just express whatever is in there that I can't write in academic-ese but that NEEDS TO BE SAID.

But right now, I will just go eat some food and then I will just go play some volleyball, which, you may notice, is nothing like writing a thesis. In fact, I can't think of one similar thing between writing a thesis and playing volleyball. Phew!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I left adulthood a long time ago for the greener pastures of fear.

Anonymous said...

I decided that "submerging my room in a lake of Pepsi" was reason enough to "put the thesis on the back burner."
All.
day.
long.
Yep, that's right.