Oscillation

Photo by David Marcu
image courtesy of unsplash.com

Well it’s an idea anyway, that there are things that I want to know all about but don’t want to have to spend the time actually doing work in order to understand.

In fact I even cheat when it comes to the classics; I have a vague understanding of books like the Odyssey and Don Quixote, even Crime and Punishment, but I hesitate to say that I’ve actually read them: I’ve listened to their audiobooks many times, but I’m still not convinced that it’s the same thing.

At any rate, there are dozens of things that are as uninteresting to me as the NFL draft that I could start looking into.

I think part of the trouble is I really do have to dig deeper if I’m going to get anywhere towards finding something that I find to be personally interesting on any kind of significant level.

What does that even mean -- I mean when you just read the wikipedia article about something, you’re basically getting the information filtered through a consensus or committee, varying in members and volume from article to article, that has had to agree at some point to what the most important, easy-to-explain, and easy to cite pieces of information about the subject are.

I’ve mentioned two things before that come back to me now on this line of thinking.

First is the idea that I could do research on how to do research itself -- sort of a crash course, try and pick up a few guides, read through the key sections, build up some conflicting viewpoints and explore my own road between them.

That’s not a terrible idea, but it’s one that I might not have as much time to devote to as I’d like -- remember that another part of the problem of avoiding burnout and abandoned blog syndrome is to not go overboard with overambitious projects and then drown in them.

The second is the idea that pretty much the only means I have at my disposal presently in terms of a formally conducted research project is the good old three-by-five notecard essay from middle school (I learned other writing programs in college, but I’m not sure any of them stuck).

I mentioned the whole 3x5 thing earlier with more or less a tone of dismissal and scorn, and I still feel largely the same way EXCEPT that I’ve realized one thing that’s changed since I was in middle school: I now actually think I understand what a thesis statement really is, and how to write a paper around one.

At least I know that I can pick out the vague notion of a topic, and write two or three thousand words around it until I sort of lazily and sort of brilliantly (well at least we can be sure it’s lazily) thread my essay through a guess at an answer to whatever question I’ve been trying to figure out.

So maybe what I need are a list of questions that I need answered, and I can go out and find the answers to them in simple straightforward research projects one and a time, and come back here to write the answer in six hundred words or less.

Again, not a terrible idea; I just have no idea where to start, with what questions or how to pick them or where I’ll find the time to do the research to get the information to form the thesis to answer the question to frame the rest of the writing around.

I could always just practice and see if I get better, without necessarily taking up too much extra time in doing so.

I’d like to end this particular session on a decisive note after all this dithering and stalling for time, so what is the next step of this plan, if it is a plan?

I could always try and read the wikipedia article on research and see where that gets me, it might just be not not lazy enough?