okay... i may be better now...
All y'all are probably out partying and getting drunk and laid right now... and here I am sitting at home at midnight on a Friday night, being a good and dutiful grad student... heh.
I got ten handwritten pages down today - how much of that is useful or remains after I've whittled away at it and typed it in remains to be seen, but it's a start, at least.
It was the first really *warm* day of the year (not just sunny), the first to actually remind you of how summer feels like. I spent a few good hours on the porch, cribbing ideas for my proposal from a textbook on urban geography... I still don't know what my research question is gonna be - something about bikes in the city...? It seems kinda silly and potentially cool and interesting, all at the same time. I'm aiming more for the latter two, of course.
So, nothing else really happened today - that's pretty much all I did, write down what I know and think so far about urban spaces, the coming of peak oil and how the sprawling suburbs are screwed, whether urban planning can be done more democratically and organically, the culture of cities, 'urban' as a quality vs. an entity (i.e. 'urban' referring to a mentality or perspective, not just physical spaces)... and then trying to figure where to fit bikes into all this. I mean, I like bikes n'all, but when it comes to trying to formulate what I'm interesting in hunkering down and learning and writing about for the next year or so, it's about all of the above issues and concepts, and trying to funnel them through the narrow channel of 'bikes' seems a bit... petty, or something similar. Absurd, maybe - at this point, it just feels a bit far-fetched... hrmm.
But all this is just angsty grousing. I think I'll be fine... I'm gonna get up early (again!) tomorrow and hammer away and develop this further. The point is to describe what qualitative social science methodologies we'll be using to conduct our research, after all, so maybe I should shift my focus from the theoretical background stuff to answering the 'how am I gonna go about my field research' question...