Last-Two-Weeks-of-the-Semester Angst

Dear Friends,
I humbly apologize for my recent blog negligence. I have, for (mostly) good purposes, been extremely busy of late. This includes:

• a trip to LA and Las Vegas during reading week, during which I did very little reading and much playing. Highlights were seeing all of my LA and LV loved ones and painting the town red with J. in Vegas. The latter included seeing the worth-every-penny-of-the-ticket-price show Avenue Q;
• the usual dose of writing and reading for my classes;
• teaching;
• preparing for an adult-ed class that ended up not having enough students to be held;
• more reading and writing;
• grading midterms;
  
• frequent headaches and really bad allergies;
• another trip to LA, this time for Thanksgiving with friends and family;
  
• taking care of J. following the removal this past Friday of his wisdom teeth;
• more reading;
  
• a long study session for a final exam;
• teaching Methodists about the Jewish understanding of Isaiah's prophecies (that is, those that are frequently read Christologically);
• and trying ro write papers that don't want to be written.

Now, I know, papers can't "not want to be written." But I am really trying to wrap my mind around the material and frame it with some semblance of order, but I'm just not getting There--"There" being that place where my mind does the brilliant tricks it usually does while writing for school. (The immediately previous sentence is an example of the not-so-brilliant writing that has emerged from this computer of late.)

I want to say something intelligent about how the Torah is a collective representation a la Emile Durkheim and that Mordechai Kaplan's framing of Torah is very similar to Durkheim's model. I also (not in the same paper) want to come up with some grand methodological model for combining Faith Development analytical methods with sociological methods in order to study conversion. Unfortunately, I am finding myself quite often staring at my computer screen, fingers to keys, and not producing anything more than one paragraph that has been re-written and rearranged probably ten times in the past week-and-a-half.

I'm in crisis mode. I have a week-and-a-half before most of the work is due. The Durkheim paper is due, however, on Thursday. I'm at the point with it where I am ready to totally trash the brilliant (but undeveloped) topic for something else entirely, just to get myself unstuck.

I feel like I all my newly acquired knowledge from the semester is all jumbled up in my head, and my brain hasn't quite processed it all. At the sociology study session last night, I felt like I knew a good deal about the material we've learned... but any in-depth, clear, well-constructed, and fully fleshed-out original thought seems illusive. And I don't know what to do about it. I just can't get to that critical moment when all the learning comes together.