engaged

i spent yesterday indoors, jotting down notes from my readings and pushing out another page or so of my paper. some of the ideas, the challenges to and from what i've been researching, have taken me in directions that are way out of the scope of the paper i'm writing, so i've got to be really careful in choosing the immediate and urgent work i do now versus the stuff i'll junk out later, possibly in a non-academic format.

i keep going back to the poster in my tenth grade science class, one of a number of classes that year that i failed abysmally due to investing greater energies in developing my appreciation for electronic music and intensely affectionate strangers:

one's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
-- oliver wendell holmes

aside from an excursion to consume junk food and criticise other people's creative writing, and another to watch a documentary about the excess of unnecessary noise in israel's urban environments, i was relatively focused and studied long into the night.