Gotta love research

I've been working on a little essay that I may eventually toss up on Medium, and for it, I found myself doing a tiny bit of research. And man, I love chasing down all the possible rabbit trails research--even of the superficial "search Google" kind--can reveal. I used to tell my students that I am not good at coming up with search terms, which is true; my brain does not get "search engine optimized" approaches to topics, so it takes me a fair amount of floundering around to find what I'm looking for. And if I head to Google Scholar (which I enjoy doing), I almost invariably find something I want to read that I can't access directly (not without paying a larger sum of money than idle curiosity would justify), so I try the NCC databases--and generally I strike out. If I'm serious enough, I'll use ILIAD (ILLIAD? I can't remember), the inter-library loan service of the NCC library. The librarians who staff that service are amazing. They can find just about anything. Librarians clearly have a particular kind of brain--one I just as clearly do not have.

Perhaps tangentially, I will report that my retirement brain has gotten hungry enough for metaphoric red meat that I have actually embarked on reading non-fiction for fun. At some point in the past, I started reading Antonio Damasio's The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. Clearly I got about half way through, then put the book down, intending to pick it up again--and didn't pick it up again until a few days ago. I will be interested to see whether I finish it this time. It is certainly fascinating. It has absolutely nothing whatever to do with the research I was doing for the little essay I was writing--nothing whatever to do with any of my writing, really--but I'm enjoying the knowledge for knowledge's sake, and I do notice that any time I read about the workings of the human mind, I see applications to my own life that are, to me, fascinating.

Shifting gears, but I realize I didn't persist in a program of writing every day long enough for it to become habituated routine. Still, I haven't given up on the prospect of that happening. I do love to write, and I have enough things going, and enough places I could go, that I don't have to feel nailed into writing just this one thing. It's writing itself that I love, not so much any specific thing that I'm writing.

But I have nothing else of great interest to report just at the moment. Tomorrow I will get one small editing job, which is returning to me after the authors have had a chance to look at my initial edits. I was supposed to get another editing job today--a slightly larger one--but so far, no sign of it. However, if it does show up, or when it does show up, I will have to put my head down and grind on it to turn it around jiffy-quick: we're running out of time before the hard deadline of "materials to press." We'll see how it sorts itself out.

I mention that because, if I'm immersed in editing, I won't be writing--or blogging--for a while. Again. But we'll see what transpires.