Monday, March 14, 2011

Late Night Edition

I thought I'd try to get a proper start to this week by going to bed early on a Sunday. Now it's 2:00 am, and I'm in one of those familiar states where I'm all but exhausted, but can't for the life of me sleep. Thank goodness for the life of a graduate student, where I can get away with working strange hours--well, until my Wednesday and Friday classes, at any rate.
A new plan, then: I'll pursue various courses, capriciously, as the mood takes me, until I taken, or rather, overtaken, further, by slumber. (All right, that was cumbersome. But I'm trying.) What will I do? Well, I shall alternate between:
1) Playing Dragon Age: Origins. I'm doing a quick run-through of the game in preparation for a playthrough of the sequel. I've placed the difficult on the lowest setting; this is a session built on exploring the gameworld, rather than challenging myself with the gameplay.
2) Reading bits and snips from A Song for Arbonne, by Guy Gavriel Kay. And that's why a sort of poetic vein is creeping into my writing here; my writing style has always been subject to osmosis, and once must admit that if I had to choose someone to imitate, I could certainly do a lot worse.
3) Reading old, archived posts of Rock, Paper, Shotgun. It was introduced to me as one of the best journalist discussions of gaming on the Net, and it's certainly kept me informed and entertained in good order. I've been reading it backwards from its start, so I am currently immersed in discussions of PC games from 2007. The cake is a lie!
4) Watching the various spiders crawl around the basement. This is, frankly, a full time occupation; without straining myself, I can immediately identify six different spiders in operation here. I used to wonder what that many spiders could find to eat down here, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the answer is "each other."
5) Transcribing some notes and choice passages from Bernard Stiegler's Technics and Time vol. 2: Disorientation. While this chapter, focusing on anthropology and technics (as many of them do) didn't really pick up for me until the discussion of style near the end, I'm starting to get an inkling as to how this can be profitably applied to my own research. And it's good that it's finally becoming clear; you don't want to read five hundred pages or so of hardcore French theory and come out at the end without any other sentiment than "well, that was fun."

I think I'd best be about my work, then.

Later Days.

3 comments:

Ryan said...

You need to immediately forget about tasks 1-3 and 5, and focus all your energy on killing every spider seen in 4.

Bill Strang said...

Is it possible for you to do just one thing?

Person of Consequence said...

@ Ryan: You don't want to upset an ecosystem that fragile. I miss one, and the next you know, we've got a race of super stealth spiders. That's how evolution works.
@Bill: probably not. Even with the spider thing, I'd have to breaks between spiders to do push-ups or something.