An Assignment

That so very much eats up my time right now, and she is in fact the culprit that keeps me up to this hour still. The university's History 299, a research course, requires students to jump through the flaming hoops involved in writing histories. There's something epic about it, especially when reading a Kennan article that just inspires one to start mining, no matter how lonely this line of work can be. No, tonight I needed to get a better handle on an assignment. The literature review represents a new challenge that I have never come across before: Guidelines from department. It lays out the whole thing, but have you ever just sat and tried to attack an assignment? For me, the whole process has turned me over my head, creating the image of the great break dancer move. You have to take a broad and fairly deep survey of the literature that has been coming out about your topic over the years. The word "evolution" nails the matter spot on. I think it is fairly obvious that historians today won't be saying what historians of yester-years talked about. Even still, how does one form all of these thoughts? Imagine a group of people are in the rain, they are using an umbrella to shelter themselves, now describe the umbrella and what shoes everyone is wearing. Okay, still doesn't make sense, but geez man! I can only keep circling around the monster which will have no choice but to be unleashed come Wednesday at 9AM in Monroe. At least I have been coming up with a way of looking at all the sources I had to gather together. I think total I must have close to 45 or so...maybe. But it's so odd, it's like everyone was having a heyday writing about the Qing and opium in the mid 20th century, then it just more or less stopped. Even more so, many of the historians worked in close relation with each other. Fairbank and Spence show up in almost every single bibliography that I could possibly imagine. Right, by the way worldcat is a very rocking program to find out where books or articles are hiding. By and large, the access to other databases has to be one of the bigger perks to attending a university.

So, some busy work has also been going on. I have to turn in a small package for the international academic study office in order to get my name in the running for the Cultural envoy scholarship, which is a pretty sweet deal. Sure, I will work for three semesters, but! It is five thousand dollars of tuition I don't have to pay. I start to find that the issue of capital rears its ugly head more than I would ever like to think it ought.

Current work for english class: Falling Man. Pretty decent post 9-11 literature, check it out!...if you want to be confused but left attempting to puzzle out "the truth" not with a capital "T" though, somewhat different. I like a novel that will make me work for a meaning.

By the by, there was a very interesting event on campus yesterday called "Mary Washicon". (."? still working out punctuation) Four clubs got together, pulling resources, and crafted the all day event. I attended a talk laid by professor Whalen about the legitimacy of studying video games. The talk focused on the up and coming future of games, namely the indie game design scene. He suggested this website. I particularly like the game involving static backgrounds. Problematic, I have a mac; most of the games are designed only for PC. Oh cruel world! I think that in terms of gaming, some of the titles coming out from large companies probably counts as "high brow" material in terms of storylines. The video game really should count as a legit medium for story telling and critical thinking.