Here’s a journal entry. I’ve used headings to facilitate your moving through the topics if you really don’t want to hear about my attempts to sleep less, or the knitting, or whatever.

Sleep

So, my body was really really intent upon the whole 11-7am sleeping schedule. Really intent. This maps pretty well onto when it gets really light in my room, and I’ve trained my body to wake up when it gets light out. I think if I’m going to zap my sleep schedule again, I’m going to have to use an afternoon nap. I really just want to sleep like an hour less, and shave that off the morning. Sigh. Well, we make do with what we’re given, right?

Knitting

This is why I don’t make a very good knit-blogger. I knit small things, and I often get cranky about my knitting.

I’m still ripping out the sleeve, I haven’t started, but it’s there in a pile in the corner, and I’ve already moved on to knitting a sleeve on the tile sweater and the tedious part of that is done. So I just have to continue on knitting this sleeve for about 16 inches and then knit a short cuff.

I’ve decided that I need to finish both of my sweaters in progress before I start another sweater. So I’m going to be focusing on knitting like gangbusters this week to try and finish the sleeve. Here’s hoping.

If I decide that I need another project, I’m going to restrict myself to socks. I made a plain sock yesterday, mostly while watching live music. It was good. I have the next toe started.

Writing

Things transpiring as reported here regarding the editing process. My goal for this week is to avoid feeling stuck by this process. I think I’m going to post a little snip today or tomorrow here. There’ll be a “breakout” tag if you’re interested.

I think I am going to try some longhand writing, because that’s fun, and I haven’t been doing enough of that.

Academia

Academic things have been taking a lot of my brain cycles in the past few days. I’m waiting on the reply of an important email, which is stressful. This whole being stuck and thus prevented from making a decision--any decision--sucks. I look forward to returning to being a human being again.

I read a number of articles this week in my field that were very very interesting, but sort of annoyingly quantitative. While I tend to walk in circles where I am the most quantitate person in the (metaphorical) room, I forget sometimes, how not quantative I am.

I mean don’t get me wrong, inferential statistics have a lot of power for detecting small (but important) effects and relationships, and I do enjoy the way that good data can allow you to make relatively definitive, albeit narrow, statements of fact. “This is happening.” or “This doesn’t happen.”

At the same time, there are situations where this kind of approach cannot be particularly effective, particularly since there are lots of variables that social scientist can’t (and wouldn’t want to) manipulate experimentally, and in these situations, the quantative approach fails at being both definitive (because of procedure) and descriptive (because of epistemic values.) And it just makes me ornery.

Great. Another thing in my life to be angsty about.

Have a good day. I’ll be in touch. I swear.

Onward and Upward!