But I Don' Wanna...

I am supposed to be writing my conference paper right now. I have absolutely no desire to work on my conference paper right now. Why hasn't everyone updated their blogs so that I can properly procrastinate? You may drive me to desperate measures.

Isn't it amazing how putting a deadline on something immediately makes it an unattractive chore for me? Suddenly everything else I was working on seems fascinating and I must continue researching it instead of writing up the paper, which is a bunch of stuff I half-wrote in another chapter and ended up having to excise, like a goiter, because it grew out of hand (in a chapter that is still too overgrown). It's not starting from scratch, but it is ugly. Perhaps my current chapter is more interesting to me at the moment because I am still in the very beginnings and mostly finding and reading things, which for me is easier than actual drafting, or what's worse, revision. Revision, ugh. Don't pin me down, man! I hate having to make a decision and argue definitively that X or Y is happening here, or choose between six or eleventy adjectives/rephrasings/synonyms/alternatives.

Writing I can do, easy. I can blorp out some stream-of-consciousness crap and fill ten pages in a good day. But my "blorp drafts" aren't even up to the quality of a crappy blog post; they literally contain my every thought including "stop looking around and just write, dammit! Why is X important and why should it come before Q in the draft? Well, in order to properly contextualize Q..." Obviously these take a lot of cleanup just to get to what other people consider first drafts. And even my good drafts (well, hell no, my what-I-consider-final-drafts but Fascistic Advisor hands back to me with a do-over notice), my advisor is always telling me to "Sharpen, Sisyphus, sharpen," and she has a little kneading hand gesture that goes with it. So I am always trying to work on precision and sharpness in my descriptions and arguments, which is the opposite of blog style. But not with this paper. I'm just cut-and-pasting, slapping stuff in one order or another and hoping that the transitions and clear connections would just write themselves while I'm not looking. Man, if I could just pull off talking my way from one half-written paragraph to another, throw some pictures up on the screen to distract everyone, and not bother with a conclusion, I'd be so set.

Oh I have so just tempted myself...