Today I am finishing up a short story due Tuesday (which I, um. Only remembered the due date of last Tuesday, but whatever! I'm good! I am so on top of things!) along with the second of two short essays also due on Tuesday. Following this, and in addition to doing my readings for the week, I will be writing two research papers from scratch, and thoroughly editing another paper which I have, thankfully, been working on throughout the semester.
I think I'm stressed by this information. However, at this point in my life I'm so used to stress that this barely even registers. Sometimes I think that removing the stress from my body would be akin to removing the blood from my veins, in that it would be messy, painful, and would probably lead me to immediately collapse on the floor.
Other things. Canterville went up this weekend, after a great deal of work and effort on the part of absolutely everyone who worked on it (WHO ARE ALL THE MOST AMAZING PEOPLE IN THE WORLD) and after I almost had a heart attack working on the program. I can't even explain how exciting it was, though: here's something completely ridiculous that my friends and I wrote, and then other people came along and set it to music and made it sound actually legitimate, and then other people came along and made it actually possible to put this shit up on a stage, and so that little ridiculous script became something actually real.
Not perfect, no, because we (the writers of the Wesleyan Musical Theater Collective) didn't always know what we were doing and only realized some of the changes we wanted to make when the show actually opened. But real, and really, really awesome.
And after winter break, it's on to the next one! And, you know, edits on the first one. All that good stuff.
But other than that... Homework. Homework, and planning out holiday gifts for people, and the fact that when my mom came up to see the show (my grandfather and my sister also drove down, on Saturday) we went to brunch at O'Rourkes on Friday, and to make a long story short, I may end up taking private baking lessons with the owner, Brian, when I get back in the spring. Exciting stuff, huh?
Side note: O'Rourkes is awesome, and the brunch line gets long but it's totally worth it.
I also need to paint my nails. They're feeling terribly bare right now.
And okay, since I have enough space here I figure I can finally keep my promise from two weeks ago; I suspect that very few people actually care about this, but I will not be deterred! And honestly, I get kind of twitchy when there's something I want to write and then I end up not getting it down.
So basically this came to mind because I was adding in the "theory" portion of my paper for Theory One, and I was reading some Bourdieu and Foucault and remembering just how much dense social theory makes me want to smack my head against a table, in the hope that this will loosen whatever is blocking my comprehension and I will suddenly be able to understand all these complicated sentences that taunt me with how useful they could possibly be to my essays.
"Oh, look at us, Sasha," they say, with their egregious verbosity. "Look at our complex sentence structures! Boggle at how we act like we're discussing something remotely understandable while you sit in your chair, staring at the page while none of it sinks in!"
I have two options, then. I can give in to my intimidation and hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia and simply run away, hoping that other sources will do just as well, or I can sit there and try to bludgeon my brain into comprehension. It usually takes a while, but sometimes I can manage it. I have a couple of tricks for dense reading — my most important is to imagine that someone like John Cleese is reading it out loud, and the silly voices and emphasis on words can help at least make it more interesting. Sometimes I'll also try to get a visual of whatever they're talking about, and of course there's my trademark technique of parsing something down and rephrasing it in the most informal way possible.
I also attempt to apply it to my own life. Maybe that's a little self-absorbed, but it helps ground me in my own life so I don't go flying off into the clouds of theory, and making it personal can sometimes help me recognize what they're talking about.
I'm beginning to wonder if I should start using fluffy animals to assist, though. I mean, imagine reading about Foucault's system of discipline, which I can actually talk about relatively easily at this point because I had to wrap my brain around it for a paper I wrote about weight loss in the fall semester of my sophomore year. If you're not familiar with Discipline and Punish, it uses sentences like this:
But the development and generalization of disciplinary mechanisms constituted the other, dark side of these processes. The general juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were egalitarian in principle was supported by these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the disciplines.
and it's possible to boil parts of it down to the fact that power isn't a top-down sort of thing: there are decrees from Up High, yes, but it also works from the ground up — namely, us normal people. If someone's doing something we don't like, we'll look at them funny, so that they're constantly policed by other people's gazes. We have the feeling that we're always being watched and judged by the people around us — and eventually that feeling internalizes, so we're always watching and judging ourselves.
Or you could just think of it this way: YOU ARE A SMALL FLUFFY ANIMAL. YOU ARE DOING SOMETHING OTHER ANIMALS DON'T LIKE, AND THEY REACT LIKE THIS:
This makes you feel like a sad panda:
Wouldn't you rather start behaving properly — whether "properly" means losing weight or adhering to military discipline or whatever — so that you can reap the rewards instead?
I'm going to be testing out this technique over the next year, I think. Because what can't be made better by small fluffy animals?
This is one of the reasons why I'm not allowed to go into academia. Theory makes my brain hurt, I give examples using photos of adorable animals, and I feel like instead of getting more appropriate, my essay-writing is instead becoming less and less formal. If I spend my entire life writing this sort of thing, one day I'm going to start writing papers that will involve sentences such as: "So let's get some Foucault up in here." Which would be fine, except then I would never get published and would lose my job.
I'm not saying that formality doesn't have its benefits, because it definitely does. As long as it's clear (oh, how I love you, clarity), formal writing can be an excellent way to A) sound professional while B) getting a point across and C) defending it thoroughly. I'm just saying that there's something deeply wrong with my brain and essay-writing sometimes drives me a little mad. Which is why I'm never allowed to be an academic, for the sake of humanity. Aren't you glad you know that now?
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