Senior Project Reflection of Weds 5/23/07
I find myself doing an awful lot of procrastinating. Some of it is typical longish blocks of random onlinity. More pernicious is what I'm calling "microprocrastination", where I spend more than 30 seconds out of every minute staring into space, getting food, rereading old reflections, or what have you. The problem with microprocrastination is that I don't notice it because it's so brief, and it becomes habit. This is a serious problem. Now that I'm thinking of it, I realize I microprocrastinated a lot when studying or doing homework (ah, that ancient time, back when I still had classes).
A solution, it seems, is to head off microprocrastination by taking short "official" breaks. Even walking around campus for a couple minutes, or switching between the library and college counseling, can get me back on track. This seems to conflict with what I said earlier about music-while-I-work being a good thing. Good, because I don't actually enjoy putting music in the background. The music I've got, I really like, so much so that I can't stop myself paying attention to it. It's not background music and it doesn't like being relegated to the background. Quiet, rather than music, is the background sound I like. It seems like working in the basement keeping David company would be a good thing, except I need a computer and I wouldn't have one down there. Ah well.
I was really afraid that conlanging would become work to me, and that I'd lose my taste for it altogether. That is not happening. What is happening is that the senior project meta-work, like keeping a journal and documenting everything, has become distasteful. (Well, it's not like I used to actively enjoy writing down every single thing I did, but I didn't actively dislike it either.) I'm not sure whether reflection-writing has become distasteful work. I do enjoy introspecting, though I don't particularly love the word-count requirement. Anyway, it's a huge relief to know that I'm not losing my taste for conlanging. When I lose my taste for working on my senior project, actual conlanging gets tainted by association with the meta-work. I'm not arguing that the meta-work requirements are a bad idea, just noting that they get laborious and/or boring sometimes.
I seem to be stuck on grammar again. I've run into another pile of largish issues that I'm not brave enough to face (yet). Motion verbs rear their head again. I've had a possible (and dare I say, edging into 'elegant') system of motion verbs kicking around in my head for at least a week now. I've never had the courage to actually go ahead and implement it. Likewise, I need to go back and rework the methods of expressing adverbs, which are kind of tricky because Tlharithad has no adverbs. Or adjectives. Everything is nouns and verbs (and random grammatical-functional bits). I think the problem is that Tlharithad has hit a relatively stable spot in its development, and I'm afraid to leap out of that spot because I don't know if I can reach the next stable spot by the time I have to present. That shouldn't be a concern, though -- I've been documenting my progress pretty thoroughly, so I can always take one of those snapshots and put it in my presentation, while active work is still going on.
A solution, it seems, is to head off microprocrastination by taking short "official" breaks. Even walking around campus for a couple minutes, or switching between the library and college counseling, can get me back on track. This seems to conflict with what I said earlier about music-while-I-work being a good thing. Good, because I don't actually enjoy putting music in the background. The music I've got, I really like, so much so that I can't stop myself paying attention to it. It's not background music and it doesn't like being relegated to the background. Quiet, rather than music, is the background sound I like. It seems like working in the basement keeping David company would be a good thing, except I need a computer and I wouldn't have one down there. Ah well.
I was really afraid that conlanging would become work to me, and that I'd lose my taste for it altogether. That is not happening. What is happening is that the senior project meta-work, like keeping a journal and documenting everything, has become distasteful. (Well, it's not like I used to actively enjoy writing down every single thing I did, but I didn't actively dislike it either.) I'm not sure whether reflection-writing has become distasteful work. I do enjoy introspecting, though I don't particularly love the word-count requirement. Anyway, it's a huge relief to know that I'm not losing my taste for conlanging. When I lose my taste for working on my senior project, actual conlanging gets tainted by association with the meta-work. I'm not arguing that the meta-work requirements are a bad idea, just noting that they get laborious and/or boring sometimes.
I seem to be stuck on grammar again. I've run into another pile of largish issues that I'm not brave enough to face (yet). Motion verbs rear their head again. I've had a possible (and dare I say, edging into 'elegant') system of motion verbs kicking around in my head for at least a week now. I've never had the courage to actually go ahead and implement it. Likewise, I need to go back and rework the methods of expressing adverbs, which are kind of tricky because Tlharithad has no adverbs. Or adjectives. Everything is nouns and verbs (and random grammatical-functional bits). I think the problem is that Tlharithad has hit a relatively stable spot in its development, and I'm afraid to leap out of that spot because I don't know if I can reach the next stable spot by the time I have to present. That shouldn't be a concern, though -- I've been documenting my progress pretty thoroughly, so I can always take one of those snapshots and put it in my presentation, while active work is still going on.