Unwieldy

It is the week of exams and we are weak from exams
We watch all our knowledge leak from our heads
As we seek to uncover one thing or another
That we know that we know, so then WHERE DID IT GO?
[written when I wrote my first middle-school midterms at age 12, and still oh so true]

If I had to choose one word to describe comps so far, it would be "unwieldy." Liberalism is not the only octopus here - all of my ideas have too many limbs, flopping all over the place, and the writing I've done is almost certainly going to be either bloated with examples and thus too long, or lacking in examples  but at the word limit, and vague. Finding a happy medium is going to be a challenge here! At this point, I've figured out the direction I'm going in, and more or less which sources I'm using, for all of my questions.

Today, at 8 AM sharp, my sex and gender questions arrived in my inbox. These weren't a surprise for me; they are basically asking me to extend the analyses that I've done in previous work for this professor, combine various ideas, and so forth. I'd already semi-drafted but never submitted a reading response connecting heteronormativity and violence, and the drafting I did pre-comps will pay off now. One of my questions is about the production of knowledge about sexuality, gender, and heteronormativity. The other is about violence and colonialism.

Challenges:
- Balancing my desire to go for a run with the need to work - I've been jumpy this week, and would run 15km each day if I had the time. Instead, I ran errands to get a bit of fitness in.
- Balancing the need for examples with the need for brevity.
- Keeping my analyses for my various papers distinct. They are threatening to tangle together - I don't want to see my knitting drawer appear in a computer window! Of course certain things like liberalism and colonialism will likely bleed, to some degree, across all six essays, but I don't want to appear fixated on any single issue.
- I'm working on how to conceptualize identity for one question, and what to do about issues of intention for others - I don't want my papers to read like conspiracy theories. This is partly an issue of agency in the face of a totalizing state. What is a state? There is so much theory that I have not read, and my anxiety over not being 100% versed in any particular body of theory is anxiety-provoking.
- Ergonomics. I don't have time this week to go out shopping for new office furniture, but sitting and working for 10-12 hours each day for five days consecutively is taking its toll on my back, wrists, and elbows. I'm wearing braces while I type, but that slows down my typing so I take them off. I can't quite coordinate chair height/monitor height/feet touching the floor in a way that works for me, even with the new cow-patterned collapsible footstool I bought today. I probably need a desk with a keyboard pullout, a raised monitor in addition to my laptop, and a chair that fits somebody my size. I get up to stretch regularly, and alternate handwriting notes and typing drafty paragraphs. I hope my body doesn't refuse to cooperate by the end of this!
- Balancing my intellectual and my emotional thoughts about violence.
- Balancing time between the six essays. I've been focusing too much on the liberalism one and the knowledge production one; there are four more that need more of my attention, and I do hope to sleep intermittently between now and the eighteenth.

Goodnight...