The Barney Jigsaw

Leaving the office in half an hour to meet Jia Ling for dinner tonight.

It's been a busy day. I sat down this morning, had a sudden gush of inspiration and completed a two-page writeup on what I actually want to do. What I want to accomplish with my research, the questions that I want to ask, and the conceptual lenses that I want to use in framing and answering those questions. Basically I was addressing the pain in my butt (non-dragonboat-related) that was bothering me for the past six months, and I finished it in two hours. Actually, less than two, if you discount the intervals that I spent in reading XKCD, which has become an obsession of late.

So it's down. I am cautiously happy with it. If everybody's happy with what I've got, I can move into the next stage of actually writing my report.

If you want to know how it feels, get the type of jigsaw puzzle that does not come with an image of what your outcome is. You have all these pieces in front of you, the different shades of blue that you suppose is either a brilliant sky, a rough sea, a huge blue eye or Barney who fell into blue paint (the possibilities are endless) but you have no idea what you're actually building.

Now let me tweak the analogy a little. The puzzle picture that you have - it can be anything. It can be anything you want it to be, as long as you can make the pieces fit together seamlessly. There is no one true answer, there is no one Barney, you can make a whole army of Barneys if you want to. They can even be purple. As long as they fit and they don't look out of place. Then it's okay.

Except that, to piss you off and make your life even more miserable than it already is, you start off with no puzzle pieces. It's a puzzle piece scavenger hunt, with no specific instructions on what you're hunting for. They're scattered everywhere. It depends on your luck and imagination and aptitude to find the pieces and make sense of them. Sometimes you meet someone in the woods and he/she happen to be knowledgeable in the type of image you're interested in building. He/she points you some directions. Of course it might not be what you want. Sometimes you are led on a wild goose chase. Then you see puzzle pieces along the way and pick them up anyway. Maybe they'll be useful in the future, you reassure yourself, patting the ever-growing sack of puzzle pieces behind your back.

My supervisor once told me, that the dissertation is only the tip of the iceberg of all the work that has been done to produce it. Beneath the cold waters is an entire mass of ice, the remaining 90% that no one gets to see. The rest of the puzzle pieces that get tossed back into the sack, that you lugged around the woods for the best years of your life, will never see the light of the day.

It is beautifully depressing.

Anyway, enough analogies and traipsing around woods and icebergs and such - I need to get going. I didn't even get to the rest of my busy day. Cheers guys.