I've been sitting in the Cage for almost 4 hours now, having hitched a ride to campus with Spousal Unit this morning to avoid the sweaty walk to the bus, and haven't really gotten anything done at all. I've written a few sentences on paper with ink, crossed them out, circled parts of them, and crossed them out again. I've rearranged a stack of notecards so that Charles Sumner's speech is at the top, then rearranged so he is at the bottom, then changed my mind and put him somewhere in the middle, then divided the piles into 3 based on degree of specificity, then returned them back to one big unsorted pile. I've surfed the net, where I just found this cool site of confessional postcards - thanks Overread for the link! My favorite today is the baby's face with the confession: For the first time since I was a baby I am finally happy. I am 28. It is beautiful. Although, I am a smidge disturbed that so many of the confessions are scatological. People are crazy, clearly. I've had an iced coffee, a yogurt, a cereal bar (cherry), and have used the backs of 4 exam questions to start new paragraphs or new organizational structures, and thrown them out again. (I have about 500 pages of used exam questions that I keep so that they don't go into fraternity files somewhere that provide my main source of scrap paper). The only thing that I'm deleriously happy about is that the Quiet Library seems to have heeded the multiple complaints made on Friday about the heat still being on in the Cages in mid-June. It is nice and cool in the Cage today, so I can actually stand to be here.

I don't know why this section is causing me such trouble. I'd love to skip it and go on to the next thing, but they're interconnected and the following sections build on this one, so I don't think I can do this without some serious reworking, which is what I'm currently supposed to be doing - reworking- and would like to avoid at a later time if it can be helped at all. I just can't seem to make it say anything. I can't seem to make myself say anything about it. Maybe it is because I'm working with some scant evidence -- that I'd like to have more. I'm only working with speeches made by members of Congress- and I guess there is only so much close interpretation of political language that one can do. I did just wonder if mabye dividing this analytical section away from the narrative section I have that comes before it isn't the way to go. Maybe I can better integrate the two, even if it means diverging from the narrative trajectory I already have (about these two Congressmen that come to blows because one calls the other a girlie-man - so ya weren't the first, Ahnold.) I'm gonna run with this for a bit and see if it gets me anywhere. At least it will keep me from reshuffling notecards!