Israel

So I have a 12 page paper due Monday morning. Now I know what you're all thinking, you're thinking "Holy cow you'd better get started on that bad boy soon, or else you won't have time to do any studying for your psych exam which is on Monday, that being the same day as your paper's deadline." But the situation is not so dire. You see, we had to write a 6 page early version about a month ago that we would then flesh out for this final paper. At the time, I thought this was irritating, but now I am reaping the benefits of having half of the paper done already.

What does this have to do with the blog? Nothing. But here's the dilemma. Every time I need to write a paper, at least lately, it ends up working like this: I keep on trying to start, but I know that I can write much better. And yet I keep on cranking out these poorly written, awkwardly connected paragraphs. But then, after a while, it starts to flow better, and I go back and redo whatever I wrote during those first twenty or so minutes. So I thought to myself, maybe I just need to warm up. You won't attempt to deadlift three hundred pounds for the first time without warming up, would you? Of course not! You'd stretch your hip flexors a bit, maybe do a couple pull throughs to groove proper hip mechanics, and start with lighter weights first. And for my last post on the blog, the same sort of thing happened (this should have been placed higher up): the first paragraph or two was pretty slow going, but then once the ball got rolling the writing went a lot faster, and I started having some fun with it.

But now that I've written two paragraphs, I'm starting to have some serious doubt. I want you all to understand my concerns, so I'll go back to a sports metaphor. If you wanted to race someone in a 400m dash, it's true, you would warm up first. But you wouldn't do just anything to warm up; you'd have to pursue a sport-specific warm up in addition to your general warm up, as detailed by Thomas Kurz in Stretching Scientifically. That is, I wouldn't prepare for a race by doing a bunch of dips or pushups; I would do some leg swings, or butt kicks, or a quick little warm up jog. Could it be, that by wasting the time of whoever is bored enough to read this, I am committing such an error? Will I go back to my essay and find that I've only warmed up for random rambling with sports metaphors thrown in? Will I be unprepared for discussing United States foreign policy toward Israel? Should I have just made a quick outline, or at least taken some time to decide what it is I'm going to write? This is a serious dilemma. I need to write a two to three page contextual introduction, and yet I have no idea what I'm going to say. Why does this matter? What reasons am I going to give? Are there any sources I should read? Is it a mistake to be sitting here without a single one of my sources handy? This seems likely.

Then again, the first paper was supposed to have said introduction, yet my introduction was one short paragraph before I cut to the chase, and yet a got a good grade. But that is foolish reasoning; it should be much easier to write 2-3 pages of filler than 2-3 pages of meat, and I really should take advantage of this great opportunity for easy writing.

Anyway, it is time to turn again to this paper. Perhaps in the future I will share the results of this experiment with you, dear readers, at least those who are left after Tim ravaged the blog mercilessly with a series of inane, pointless posts.