Crunch

It's the end of the term. Here's what I gotta do in the next week and a half:

- Finish my readings for three classes.
- Write three reflection papers of 2-3 pages that have virtually nothing to do with developing my thesis.
- Write a 10-page case presentation for my group supervision by tomorrow.
- Find more books/articles for my lit review.
- Finish writing a reasonable first draft of my thesis.

Crap.

Productive Day

Today, I had hours and hours in front of me, with no social plans til dinner time. This was one of the rare days I'd set aside to try to knock out a respectable chunk of work on the thesis. Instead of working diligently as I'd planned to do, I ended up besting the top Dr. Mario score on the ol' Nintendo 64 (*must* click). That is right, my friends, I got to 108,600 points with a viral load filling over 75% of the pill bottle. I'm sure some of you out there have done better than that, but let me just say that me getting the top score means beating out Astrid, her siblings, and various lovers, friends, and roommates who have played that game over the last dozen years. I am the Dr. Mario Champion.

Now, back to death anxiety.

Words for B.M.

"Game Night" at E-Dawg's tonight. I just got home. It's 4:00 AM - no shitting.

Speaking of "shitting," we played the Parlour Game for hours this evening. The crowd at the party were prone to making pretty much everything about sex or bodily functions. The Parlour Game is simple, and usually I've played it with my family on our annual retreat in Monterey. It's a friendly game in which you sit in a circle of folks and take turns thinking of categories. A category is chosen, a 2-minute timer is set, and everyone brainstorms as many things as they can think of in said category. Let's say the category is "Tom Cruise movies" - we all have 2 minutes to come up with as many of 'em as possible, i.e. Top Gun, Rain Man, Risky Business, The Outsiders, Losin' It, etc. Scoring is similar to the game "Boggle"; you get a point for every unique answer, and answers you share with other players are crossed off your list. Anyway, as I was saying, I usually play this game with my family, so it tends to be a pretty much P.G. affair. This evening at E-Dawg's was a bit different. The first category someone picked was "sex toys" which ended up lasting like forty-five minutes in itself (we didn't time the first few rounds - just went around and around the circle for more answers.) Then when we started writing down answers in timed rounds, we did "Ways to say 'having sex'," "Euphemisms for masturbation," and the crowd pleaser, "Words for having a bowel movement." Favorites for that round were "laying pipe," and "voiding the colon." Um, yeah. When I next play the Parlour Game with the family, I'm gonna be so bored when categories like "Beatles songs" and "household appliances" come up.

I can't believe it's 4:30 AM.

Deadline

Between now and December 6, I have to cough up the first draft of my thesis. I have about seven sources summarized, and three or four more sources waiting to be read. I have to dig up several more articles and make time to read them. I have to begin writing, narrow my topic, complete my lit review, and somewhere in there, figure out how to contribute some sort of "new thought" to the topic. Being that the awareness of death has been an obsession of humanity since the first glimmers of consciousness, I feel rather intimidated about producing original thought on the subject.

My main question, as it has been refined recently, is something like this: how does the awareness of death impact and shape our intimate relating with our love objects? ("Object," in the psychoanalytic sense, meaning "other" or "person" as opposed to a physical, inanimate object.)

And here lies the underlying reason for my mental block to sitting down and writing: I'm scared shitless about the topic. I picked the topic because I'm scared shitless about it. Now I have to produce something. Anything, really, so long as I get some words down on paper. It's just a rough draft, I tell myself.

A classmate of mine had an inspiring suggestion yesterday. She's decided to try to get down all her own thinking about her topic, what interests her about it, why she chose it, what her ideas are, unclouded by "expert" opinions. Then after she's got 10 or 15 pages, she'll go back and add in sources that support and negate her own ideas. I think there's some serious wisdom in this, and it excites me to think about. I think I've been bogged down in incorporating the historical and current "thinking" about the topic and in the process have become out of touch with what the hell I think about it.

So I'm going to try to do some freewrites over the next few days, and see what comes out. And then I'm going to schedule a trip to the library at the SF Psychoanalytic Institute and gather more sources, read them, and then start putting some structure to the thing.

Now I'm all fired up, and shit. Let me at it!