Inside on a beautiful day.

Today, I declared, would be a research day. And it was. But unfortunately, unlike the previous few days beforehand, today has turned out to be absolutely gorgeous weather-wise. And I spent all that time in the basement of the library, surrounded by a vigorous lot of books, scribbling on college-ruled notebook pages as I listened to Band of Horses and Cat Power on my ipod mini until the battery died. Lines from Bright Eyes pop to mind, "I'm hunched over a type writer / I guess you'd call that painting in a cave." In case you were wondering, yes, I am writing my senior thesis in a physical, tangible notebook, using real pens and everything. I got roughly three and a half pages written in four and a half hours; that's over 10% of my final paper! Always good to be optimistic.

But I do think I got some good work done on it today, and I paced myself, stopped when I felt that I wasn't going to write as well anymore. I got one third of the first part of three completed - and I mapped out where I was going with things so that I would be able to keep better track of how stuff flows and what I should be researching and looking up next, et cetera. The trick will be citing all the sources properly when I type it up and making sure that I'm not forgetting to utilize any of the sources that I have. It may sound kind of odd, but the deal with history papers is that the more sources you can use, the more work people think you've put into something, so if something is in two books, you cite it from the one you haven't used as much, and so forth. I've got this whole paper-writing thing down - I just wish I could focus more.

Not that I can't focus, but just that I know I have to write another term paper (though certainly not as big) for my 1960s and American Culture course, and our Pre-Study Abroad seminar requires a research paper (albeit a small one) on something to do with our host country, and I'm going to have to write a full lab report for Biology soon, and there's always all the little papers that come up in the course of things... I kind of wish that I could have nothing to do except write my senior thesis so that I would be able to do my absolute best on it. But I guess such a setup doesn't really exist ever.

Anyways... it's a beautiful day outside, and I'm going to go get my homework taken care of for the week, because Lord knows it's not going to get done tomorrow!