divine angst

I’ve been so stressed about getting stuff done before this weekend, that I haven’t really dwelt on why I have to get stuff done before this weekend: my brother is visiting, and we’re going to be BUSY.

After my middle-of-the-night stress attack, I feel better about what I’m doing and writing, so I am less concerned about not getting everything done that I need to. (As someone noted, more footnotes take up more space, and I haven’t really been focusing on my footnotes. I need to start writing parentheticals!) Our apartment is clean, the dog is bathed, his bedding is washed, and I even vacuumed the rug outside the front door. We are ready for visitors, I still have a few hours to work, and, best of all, my brother is coming to visit! There’ve been some family developments in the last week or so, so I’m looking forward to dishing over that, and, of course, I’m excited for my brother to meet Himself (whom he will spoil to death, I’m sure). Mostly, I’m just looking forward to spending some time with someone who knows me better than almost anyone. I never have to be “on” with my brother.

I’m working diligently right now, so I won’t have another stress attack over the weekend. Working, working, working. Feeling pretty good about it, actually. The more work I do, the more fun this weekend will be.

After tossing and turning for an hour, my mind racing and spinning, I decided to get up and quiet my brain by doing some work. I opened my laptop, pulled up my comment draft, and stared at it.

And then I started working. I refined a few things, I tweaked some others. I looked up something online so I could make sure the language I was using was correct. I reread one of my core arguments, one that I worked on this morning, and confirmed that I was on the right track with it. I scanned through the sections that need fleshing out, making mental notes and a few textual notes, but basically feeling I had everything in place.

And then I looked at my page count.

I short of my page limit by one-third.

I’m not sure what I have left to do will take that many pages.

This is no longer a matter of getting the writing done–given my current organization, I can draft the remainder of this thing pretty quickly. I just don’t know that it’s going to take twenty pages to do it.

I can’t decide if this is because my argument is a lot narrower than I thought it would be or if it’s because I’m making some logical leaps that aren’t apparent to me. I’d like to avoid unncessary background, so I’ve made that section pretty short and to-the-point. Maybe I need to fill in some details. Maybe, instead of describing a piece of representative legislation, I need to outline every piece of substantive legislation in this area. While that would certainly fill in the pages, I can’t say I think it would make my paper better.

The one benefit of getting up in the middle of the night tonight is that I’ve actually looked at this thing with eyes for the large-scale organization, and I see now what’s going on. That’s good. It means I’m likely to be able to go back to sleep, at least tonight. I just wish I knew what was going to happen in the next week and a half.