It has been a long time since I've felt the buzz of a lack of sleep due to staying up to write a paper for a class and only getting a few hours of sleep. There is a palpable altered state that combines a hyper-awareness of the minutia of life (the way the air feels, the sounds of the world surrounding you, the jiggling of the pixels on your computer screen) with the exhausted feeling of accomplishment. Now I know the paper isn't the best I could have done. I realized at about 1:15 this morning that I had bitten off way more than I could reasonably masticate. But that is not entirely a planning fault. The topic of the paper was basically "Can the theory we've read about in the past four weeks to current American society?.... in 2-3 pages (or 3-4 if for graduate credit)".
Yeah. That is quite a topic for such a short paper. I had my bullet-pointed notes that I wanted to cover, all I had to do was fill in around them. Somewhere towards the end of the second page, I realized that I was only 1/3 into my bullet points. In order to do this topic justice, I would need at minimum a doctoral dissertation of a few hundred pages. But I only had two more. At 2:00, I hit the top of the fourth page and decided to wrap it up. This is not the paper I wanted to write, but it is a good start on a longer paper that may eventually get written.
Posted by silsby at February 11, 2005 08:36 AM