Chewing of nails....

..almost non-stop since 12mn, and well...for the earlier part of today.

It's like this when I'm trying to focus on work. I don't know if it's an anxiety thing or it helps me to think. I just suddenly catch myself biting again even though I distinctly remembering stopping only moements ago...hee....

It's now 3am, so I'm taking a break...

I'm on to my last assignment of my module (hopefully the last, but will take it as it is...)

But believe it or not, I haven't written a single word of the expected 2500 essay.

I had decided to give myself a break from the Grad Dip work till Christmas day. So it was only yesterday I got down to taking a good look at the question. It's not a hard one. It's straightforward but the more you think about it, you start to realise that there are several challenges.

It's the kind of question, pretty much like a GP paper, where, with one's opinion, experience and observation you are able to answer. So good and simple right?

However, it soon dawned on me that a solid paper would have to be one with wider reading and referencing to journals and articles. Not the self opined sputterings of a 31 year old.

Thank God a swift decision was made while sitting on the loo bowl at 1500h on sunday, that given the context of the question, there is no need to plunge into hardcopy boooks from the library as per my previous modules, and a focus on online materials should be sufficient.

For 4 hours yesterday evening, to free my mind from biasness, I filled my mind with random reading to anything or something that is close to the topic. That's the challenge of the internet information overload.

There's so much available, you need to spend time searching and reading through, even skip reading to help you determine if there's any info that could be useful, or worse, realising it's all completel trash...

Articles found need to be checked if there's proper references/ authorship and of course, the date for relevancy (i.e. I can't be referencing another's sputterings.)

A sense of dismay when diagrams are blocked/ omitted by the author, and having to consider the latest antics to 'download/ read the rest' by allowing full access to my facebook!!! (never will happen...)

Do not be deceived by blogs I learned the past 24 hours, as some are genuine postings/ articles.

I pooled what i could and noted some URLs, which I hoped are useful, and went to zzzz...

At noon today, I looked at the same URLs and went.."WTH..."

Hahahaha...really ah, sometimes you wonder why you were so drawn to it in the first place...

Anyway, in an hour, I had reached some sort of pain wall. Because I was stuck. Didn't know how to start and how to structure. I could go any way. *Damn*....it was also accelerated by the fact i had to apply some of my lecturer's personally created diagnostic models to my assignment. (brain all wony now...)

So i buried my head under a pillow and had horrid afternoon dreams of arguing about Gen X (hahaha...first hint of my topic!!!)

so yep, here I am, started back on my assignment since midnight. And still not a word.

Aiyooo...

I have to finish this by Friday, at least 99% of it. Submission on Tues. (no time in between)

I have scribbled some form of structure/ flow to the essay. However, I feel slightly paralysed. It's as though I'm not convinced it will work, or ther'es something irking me that's missing...and of course, where to start: " work on chunks that are not connected and hope you'll find a connector or figure out the connectors which means you need to find the chunks to fit them..."

=S ....faint!

It's now 330!

I can do more if I want, however, I think reading those articles again will only cloud my mind further.

so am going to bathe and watch soccer! heee...(of course will fall asleep sooner or later lah..=))