Saturday, August 02, 2008
(11:20 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Not knowing what to do
I have spent close to a half hour sitting on the couch sipping on a cup of coffee -- essentially, doing nothing. I don't know what to do.This morning, I finished my usual morning tasks early (go through my feeds on Google Reader, do vocab exercises on Super Memory, read a couple pages of German), leaving a gap before lunch. The problem is deeper than that, though. I don't know what to do after lunch, either.
I could clean the apartment, having only cleaned the bathroom yesterday, but I don't want to inconvenience my roommate by mopping the floors while he's home. I could do other non-mopping tasks (dusting, the small amount of vacuuming we have), but they would only take a trivial amount of time.
I could do some review in preparation for writing my second, "easy" dissertation chapter, but I've hit a roadblock there -- some stuff I was going to consult from Ritschl's Doctrine of Justification is from volume 1, and I only have volume 3. I don't even know if it's really necessary to use the Ritschl stuff, since my main concern is Aulen. Still, it's a roadblock.
I could read some Nancy for my AAR presentation. I could also read Laclau's Populist Reason, seeing as how I've agreed to do something for a panel thereupon that may or may not come together as an additional event at the AAR. I could also finish a book that I've been nursing for about three weeks, or at least make some progress.
I could even take advantage of the fact that all extant episodes of Mad Men are available "On Demand" currently, or watch one of my Netflix.
I could also write a blog post with some kind of content to it, but I feel drained of all content unrelated to my dissertation and have decided not to blog directly about my dissertation. I'm not especially overflowing with dissertation-related material at the moment either, in any case.
Instead of doing all that, though, I apparently chose to express my inaction actively, by writing a blog post listing everything I could be doing, but am not in fact doing.
