Personal Reflection: Dorms

After 3 hours it’s hard for anything to be good or enjoyable.

First I was reading Januszewski, then it was grassroots video wiki stuff, then it was the Creswell text... This fun began at 3am and it’s now 7:45am as I write this draft. At some point this morning the fun disappeared.

I believe one of my greatest strengths is that I can do things well even when they stop being fun. Being raised by Polish parents who were born in a WWII German labour camp, I was raised with the belief that enjoyment was the optional part of any task.
Things that needed doing got done. Enjoyment was nice, but not necessary.

This morning my parents would have been proud. No enjoyment, but I still kept reading. This was until I got to chapter 4 of the Creswell text. Things changed then. I loved the advice on producing a thesis, particularly writing strategies. That chapter was better than Pulp Fiction.

Have you ever said something negative about people in general terms, and then realized it applied directly to the person you told it to? Yeah, that kind of moment …

The funniest thing about the morning was page 82 of the Creswell text:
One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark. When I furnished this study seven years ago, I pushed the long desk against a blank wall, so I could not see from either window. Once, fifteen years ago, I wrote in a cinder-block cell over a parking lot. It overlooked a tar-and-gravel roof. This pin shed under trees is not quite so good as a cinder-block study was, but it will do. (Dillard, 1989, pp.26-27)

That’s exactly what my dorm is like here at U of C. It’s a terrible place to live, but a great place to read and exercise --like prison.

Anyway, that eerie/comic moment on page 82 was a wonderful end to my morning. Good day everybody. Happy reading/writing wherever you may be.

Peter