Blessed by the Potato

I’m sitting here trying to burn through the last few bullent points on my long list of thesis changes, and find I’m getting really antsy. My feet are dancing around and I can’t sit still. I can tell Wayfare’s sick of me hopping around the apartment burning off energy and being a general goof.

These last few paragraphs are really, really painful. Every cycle I’ve gone through of giving this to my supervisors and getting it back, these few paragraphs have come back as not satisfactory and been re-written. I wonder if I’m out of ways to say the same thing again. Part of the problem is that I already know what it is I’m trying to get at, so all my explanations make perfect sense to me, I don’t see any of the ambiguity, since I’m not coming at this in a fresh way, trying to understand and interpret the text.

It reminds me of the story Wayfare tells me about tests they give to kids who have Asperger’s/autism. You take a box, and show it to the kid and ask what’s inside “I don’t know!”. Then, you show them what’s inside… “A pencil!”. Then, you ask them what another person, who hasn’t seen inside the box yet, would say is inside the box. The correct answer is that the other person wouldn’t know what’s in the box, since they haven’t seen inside yet; but these kids instead tend to say “a pencil!”.

For your own personal curiosity, I failed the test myself. I can be pretty empathic at times, and completely… off at others. I think I’ve entered the “a pencil!” zone for this last bit of my thesis (in addition to all the other mental/emotional roadblocks I’ve slammed into). Also, for those who’ve seen Wayfare smack her head and exclaim “a pencil!” when I’m being dense/antisocial and then laugh herself silly, this is where that comes from.