deuxlits

i have not posted in gajillion years as i have been completely snowed under by deadlines. technically this is my spring break, but damn —my plate is full. i guess i’m just gorging at the deadline buffet and my eyes are bigger than my stomach. i seem to have this problem of not being able to say “NO.” there are so many exciting projects and ideas and as a interdisciplinary scholar, it’s a real challenge to maintain some sense of core and center when i see nothing but connections everywhere. so a lot of these deadlines are part of this early phase of trying to establish serious intellectual bridges across seemingly disparate bodies of subjects which only contributes to that “headless chicken” feeling that i get more often than i would like. i had already told myself after my experiences from last quarter that i wasn’t going to do any travel this quarter as i was starting to feel that i really needed to buckle down and do some “serious” work and thankfully, i’ve kept true to that promise. however, these past two weeks have brought on new challenges where i find myself voyaging across different intellectual domains and trying to keep it coherent at the same time: from venturing across musical metaphors of improvisation and performance, to more systems-oriented ideas of information flow, to sociological frameworks of structure and agency it’s quite a challenge. and i know i’m not the only one having to contend with this kind of ambiguity. i wish there was some kind of resource for those of us engaging in interdisciplinary work. like some kind of one stop shop, just to trade stories, or advice as to how to build bridges across these displaced nodes in the network…but maybe that’s something that we all have to do individually.