I found the following passage in my old journal (still must get around to deleting that sometime...), and feel like it is relevant to the week I have had (see below for an update):

And just so you know.......
Just because I may look like an idle postgraduate student, wrapped up in a cardigan, dark circles around my eyes from thesis stress, library fines up to my eyeballs, a malnourished pallour, an addiction to caffiene that is completely unhealthy and probably life-shortening... that doesn't mean I'm not thinking about something deep....
I may be eating tamarillos in the sun on my back doorstep, BUT I'm actually considering the Modernist technique of "stream of consciousness" writing, and how it can possibly unite both narrative structure and characterisation, yet still be aligned with the Modernist principles of fragmentation and meaninglessness......
I may be washing the bathroom floor, BUT I'm actually thinking about how to give an incisive reading of the textuality in the later works of Virginia Woolf......
I may be hanging out the washing, BUT I'm trying to combine a theory that 'long coats' are emblems of danger in children's novels, with a concept of the wider implications villains' appearances and the subsequent reflections of disturbed personalities, without going over my 2000 word limit...


As for this week?
It may look like I'm watching "Dr Phil", BUT I'm actually considering the complicated textual history of an obscure Coleridge poem, and wondering how to combine all the critical material into approximately 600 words....
It may look like I'm baking lemon syrup cake, BUT I'm actually mentally planning an essay on a Carol Ann Duffy poem about Pontius Pilate's wife, and how I can relate this to a feminist reading of the King James Bible....
It may look like I'm sitting by the window waiting for the postie to bring me a letter (or a bill, even - I'll take anything), BUT really, I'm thinking about the seminal article that C.S. Lewis wrote on the influence of the KJB on English Language, and how I can work something clever about it into an essay....
It may look like I'm checking my e-mail a couple of times a day in the hope that someone has written to me about anything other than ordering Viagra pills or 'get rich quick' schemes, BUT actually... no, I'm just checking my e-mail a couple of times a day, in the hope that someone has written to me.