Yesterday's meeting with one of my advisors went well, and I now have greater confidence in my ideas and my approach. However, he did find several intriguing, new ideas to add into the mix. I am drowning in ideas here, folks!

My greatest struggle as an academic has always been that I have trouble seeing the forest for the trees. That is, I can readily lose sight of the broad outlines, the big picture, under a welter of details. Happily, this has also become my greatest strength. My method of working is to take all the details into my awareness, bit by bit, until my mental image of the material expands enough that the big picture emerges from it. To put it another way, I come to know the forest by first learning every tree. The patterns that I am able to perceive, using this method, are rich, complex, and nuanced. To boast a little (just a little): this is a valuable ability.

But it has its downsides. I can flail for a long time at the threshold between whole-lotta-trees and gosh-look-a-forest. I do not like models that only work if one ignores a pesky counter-example here and there. And I am drawn to elegant solutions as much as anybody else, so even when I begin to first see patterns, it may still take a fair bit of work to perceive the best one, the right one. This method is not quick or easy, and it lends itself all too readily to perfectionism.

That's where I'm stuck right now: sifting through the details, finding and testing and discarding patterns, writing in circles as I search for the One True Interpretation.

I have only a little over a week left before I must put aside my work on this chapter and attend to writing a couple of papers for talks. And once the second talk is over, I only have another two weeks to convert my work on this chapter into another talk. I need to move quickly, and to do that, I need to find a sense of certainty in my analysis, perhaps even a sense of finality.

My hope is to get back underway with my writing today. The past two weeks haven't been very productive, and it is time for that to end. My working day is short today, to allow my husband to get a turn at his own work. The bright side: I get to go home to my sweet little son all the sooner! But I had better get down to work now.