Thursday, October 18, 2007

reboot

curious time to write a blog entry.

i'm sitting here with my fingers tapping the keys with a law journal, a codal, the constitution, several websites on law idle on my browser, and a lot of scratch paper strewn throughout the room. ok, only two scratch papers. and they’re on my desk.

i paused to keep my brain from short circuiting. i am writing a paper (due monday, ganda lang…) about pinoy literary writers, blogging, and jus vindicandi. don’t ask about the last element of that series. not now.*


i previously entertained a lot of potential topics to write about, and was pretty excited about the prospects i had, when i stumbled upon the most basic of all questions when writing a paper: is it a research problem? imagine the horror when the basic question became the rhetorical question. with the answer an obvious, big, fat NO. panic.

a series of consultations later (read: one), i was pointed the way out of “that-is-not-a-research-problem” shit-hole. so, here i am tapping the keys. but i had to stop again. right in the middle of writing it. well, actually, i’m in the middle of re-imagining it than writing it.

it is always fun, though not productive, to re-imagine things just when you’re right smack in the middle of actually doing other things. the “other things” being the more urgent. my wife can write a short story in the middle of writing a chapter of her thesis due the following day. i can pull off a wicked trade coup in nba 2k7 in the middle of writing a paper on landscape painting and another on a respected sculptor. it’s no comparison, i know, but zip it. just zip it.

i had to re-imagine it because i realized my direction takes the paper a bit out of the ambit of the course. it is beginning to look more like a paper for a course i will be taking some two semesters from now. so before i go any further, and suffer any more damages (real or imagined), i had to stop. and re-imagine how to write this. and i think i know how to write this. operational word being “think”, not “write”. panic.


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*don’t you just hate the third element of any three-element series, the one that leaves you scratching your head and saying “come again?”