Tuesday 9 February 2021

February 9, 2021

Tried again properly with the robo-hairbrush. 

Same result, with the added bonus of a burned hand because I couldn't be arsed to get the glove out.

Got a MH appointment through for 9 April. Luckily I started feeling better last week.

Slipped out to post a birthday card and the banks of the brook were full of pending snowdrops:

The rest of my time was spent trying to make progess on this god-awful essay.

Like the hairbrush, I've tried to do it properly this time instead of just winging it.

And it's resulted in this horrible swamp I feel I've been wading through for the last three thousand years. 

I'm sure it wasn't this hard last time I wrote an essay. Back then, I used to look at the question until it haunted my dreams, and then more or less as I was writing it, go digging in books and papers for things I could use. Hunter-gathering.

This time, urged by my student support lady, I have reversed this process. I've done extensive reading first, amassed copious notes, sorted them into plans and outlines, plotted it all out before I start. Point - Evidence - Example and all that malarkey. Shaped ideas rather than just flinging them at the page and hoping, or drawing them together with witchcraft. Your basic agrarian.

And I cannnot write the thing.

I suspect doing it properly has just enabled my tendency to get bogged down in overthinking.

Exempli gratia. Thinking about overthinking made me want to find a meme to illustrate the point, which led me to this:

  
 
Which reminded me of the one and only time I decided to jump off the top board at a municipal swimming pool. This was in the 1990s. I was up there for perhaps half an hour, frozen in terror, with children streaming past me to blithely plunge to their certain deaths, before I was coaxed down the quick way by an encouraging and sympathetic nine year old.

Which reminded me of this:


And of course somewhere along the way it occured to me I should google 'what does e.g. stand for', and that was an hour gone.

My ADHD brain: working against me on this essay and in life. 

Interesting tangents are so much better than boring stuff!

When the essay is done and I do get my life back, I will be interested to read this New York Times piece about Britney Spears. Spend hours on Twitter again. Slob about. Watch a DVD. That kind of thing. 

Can't wait.

Today's photo: Chimneys

 

 


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