desultory thinker

The weekend means little these days. Except for the welcome party on Friday -- Long, who's dj-ed in the past, turned it into a dance party. Any English function that turns into dancing to Billie Jean is a success in my opinion.

My work this weekend has been: brainstorming around five or six different ideas toward a dissertation. It was back to the drawing board after my meeting with Franco last week, and so I've returned to some ideas I had initially passed over. What I'm learning in all this: I'm a slow, distracted, desultory thinker. I can riff off a close reading for any number of pages, but sitting down to think about terms/ideas in the abstract, creating a framework, is a different problem. I tend to have spurts of productivity, followed by complete boredom with whatever I'm looking at, followed by a random spark of an idea, which, after writing down, I decide is good enough to be the END POINT OF WORK FOR THE DAY, TIME TO CHECK POLITICAL BLOGS (It's never good enough to quit for the day.)

And then to take a break, I read Nancy Armstrong. Whose book, How Novels Think, is SO MUCH BROADER THAN MY UPSTART PROJECT WOULD HAVE BEEN. I guess this is what you get to do, after you've done the build up work. For now, I'm to narrow, narrow, narrow.

And to take a break from that, I plug along in my data entry "research" position.

And to take a break from this routine, I took a jaunt to Target (CHOCOLATE), and this morning, visited the farmers' market. Where I bought carrots, parsnips, potatoes, chard, and an onion, with which to make this winter soup recipe I found inspiring on The Wednesday Chef. And I bought a chocolate croissant: deliciousness. Made me miss Switzerland.