Friday, November 20, 2009

Contemplating Theory is Turning Me Into an Insomniac Zombie...In A Good Way

I feel like completely vegetating all night and all weekend. Which I won't, because I've been like the intellectual energizer bunny lately - constantly working through these intese theoretical paradigms and working to apply them to my problem. I feel like I finally made some breakthroughs yesterday after struggling through this morass of psychoanalytic and semiotic critical texts so that I really have something innovative to say on paper that got accepted at an academic conference in Feb: The Hero in the Playground of the Id: An Inquiry into why Twilight is Popular.

But really, this is a philosophical inquiry that I've been working through over the past few years regarding my love for young adult literature - I feel like I'm finally tracing some of the threads of that attraction, and also, my own personal philosophy of the place of storytelling in one's personal and public life. Thinking and working through it all is LITERALLY keeping me up at night - I've had the worst insomnia because the idea-mill refuses to stop churning.

I went and saw New Moon this afternoon - luckily bought my tickets ahead of time because the ENTIRE day's shows were already sold out by 3pm. So I watched that, then feel like I have this overload of new data to incorperate with all that I've already been thinking about.
And I want to submit an alternate version of the paper to a book of academic essays about Twilight, so I've been trying to finalize that abstract. And I have a presentation due in another class this coming up Tuesday about three other theoretical frameworks - analyzing critical articles, identifying underlying theoretical base, and applying it to a Hemingway short story.

And what I really want to do is curl up and vegetate. Soak in, without contemplating. Just. Be. Without thinking about being, you know?

But then, what I really want is more time and energy because all of this is lighting my ass on fire to get cracking at my own YA novel (left in the dust now for a month) and enrich it with all this new shit I've been learning and feeling. The thing is - I LOVE everything that I'm doing - all the new things that I'm learning - I feel like it's been an explosion of contemplative exposure - my courses in literature have turned into courses about life, and seeing the world, and I'm completely fucking awed by it.