(no subject)
So. Went into Great Barrington to meet with an OCD specialist yesterday. They want to put me on medication. Sigh.
My mum talked with my da last night about this and this morning my mum said that Da wants to take the Minithesis to some old friends and see if it's impressive enough to get me into graduate school early, so I don't have to take all these different drugs to beat my integrity into submission sufficiently to survive college...and so I don't have to angst over SELF vs. WORLD quite as much.
I'm hopeful. And so glad that I've been working so goddamn hard on said Minithesis.
(I changed its organisation around yesterday and wrote some of the Author's Note discussing the rational behind my choice of a colloquial-instead of suffocatingly scholarly-style. I've been going through all the chapters and rewriting them so they're not so pedantic and are more fun to read. In addition to the primary focus of tracing the genealogy of various Biblical elements, I've assigned each element a mythological lesson; for instance, the Creation story leads into a discussion of the need to categorise/name/organise/divide and educational phenomenology, with a Jungian slant. Each of the three groups (Stories, People, and God) will eventually end up with an overarching theme, and the Afterword will pull everything together. Beforehand, the Minithesis was just a collection of anecdotes about interesting things in Genesis and Exodus along with a gaggle of appendices. With the lessons and themes, the anecdotes become coherent-contributing to a greater understanding-and almost take on the form of a memoir...it's kind of strange, but exciting and I'm pleased with the direction it's taking. I'm slightly less stressed than usual, but still pretty stressed. The Minithesis needs to acquire a title before the 18th. I'd just been hoping I would come across a striking phrase that would suit its purpose, but it hasn't yet and I'm trying to cut down on the research at this point...even though I'm adding more material to it, I'm trying to cut down the page number so it's not this 300+ page monolith. Granted, probably half of that is the appendices and citations and footnotes, but still.
It's almost encouraging that I've done as much as I have; it seems like writing in such a broad format somewhat circumvents the Passive-Aggressive and Obsessive-Compulsive Editor that ordinarily makes it impossible for me to write papers...and allows my hypergraphia to do its thing like it did before I acquired said Editor. And then I end up with a bunch of material to edit and reorganise and fuss around with, but the point is I'm actually writing and getting things out of my head and it's been very, very encouraging. It seems like essays are much more difficult to me because they're so small, and I feel that they require a certain economy of space that I'm just...very uncomfortable with. I think it's related to how I study things; from general to specific to general. Essays require me to be general when I haven't had a chance to be specific, whereas the Minithesis allows me to be specific, and I can actually write introductory chapters to each of the three groups that are quite general and pleasantly short. I should just write theses instead of papers! After I've written enough theses, maybe I'll be comfortable writing stand-alone essays. Heh!)
It'd be pretty funny if I got into grad school at 18. High school, one semester. College, four semesters. Graduate school? I might actually stick around long enough to get a degree.
My mum talked with my da last night about this and this morning my mum said that Da wants to take the Minithesis to some old friends and see if it's impressive enough to get me into graduate school early, so I don't have to take all these different drugs to beat my integrity into submission sufficiently to survive college...and so I don't have to angst over SELF vs. WORLD quite as much.
I'm hopeful. And so glad that I've been working so goddamn hard on said Minithesis.
(I changed its organisation around yesterday and wrote some of the Author's Note discussing the rational behind my choice of a colloquial-instead of suffocatingly scholarly-style. I've been going through all the chapters and rewriting them so they're not so pedantic and are more fun to read. In addition to the primary focus of tracing the genealogy of various Biblical elements, I've assigned each element a mythological lesson; for instance, the Creation story leads into a discussion of the need to categorise/name/organise/divide and educational phenomenology, with a Jungian slant. Each of the three groups (Stories, People, and God) will eventually end up with an overarching theme, and the Afterword will pull everything together. Beforehand, the Minithesis was just a collection of anecdotes about interesting things in Genesis and Exodus along with a gaggle of appendices. With the lessons and themes, the anecdotes become coherent-contributing to a greater understanding-and almost take on the form of a memoir...it's kind of strange, but exciting and I'm pleased with the direction it's taking. I'm slightly less stressed than usual, but still pretty stressed. The Minithesis needs to acquire a title before the 18th. I'd just been hoping I would come across a striking phrase that would suit its purpose, but it hasn't yet and I'm trying to cut down on the research at this point...even though I'm adding more material to it, I'm trying to cut down the page number so it's not this 300+ page monolith. Granted, probably half of that is the appendices and citations and footnotes, but still.
It's almost encouraging that I've done as much as I have; it seems like writing in such a broad format somewhat circumvents the Passive-Aggressive and Obsessive-Compulsive Editor that ordinarily makes it impossible for me to write papers...and allows my hypergraphia to do its thing like it did before I acquired said Editor. And then I end up with a bunch of material to edit and reorganise and fuss around with, but the point is I'm actually writing and getting things out of my head and it's been very, very encouraging. It seems like essays are much more difficult to me because they're so small, and I feel that they require a certain economy of space that I'm just...very uncomfortable with. I think it's related to how I study things; from general to specific to general. Essays require me to be general when I haven't had a chance to be specific, whereas the Minithesis allows me to be specific, and I can actually write introductory chapters to each of the three groups that are quite general and pleasantly short. I should just write theses instead of papers! After I've written enough theses, maybe I'll be comfortable writing stand-alone essays. Heh!)
It'd be pretty funny if I got into grad school at 18. High school, one semester. College, four semesters. Graduate school? I might actually stick around long enough to get a degree.