I’ve read more abstracts for journal articles than pages in the books I’m meant to be reading. I’m still on the same two novels I was on a fortnight ago because I’ve lost interest in reading… meaning that I’m writing all of the time instead. My days look like 9am-11pm downstairs in the den just writing or watching TV. I’m currently writing an essay/reflection on Indigenous Australian art and how it is and can be used as activism. The articles/books I’ve been looking at are either about art activism, Indigenous activism, or specifically Indigenous activism art.

The article that struck me the most was an article about art activism that I couldn’t make any sense out of in the middle of the night and still can’t really make sense of. I basically skimmed the paragraphs because the language used was so verbose that it was like I was reading it in another language. I feel like I could read a passage of Japanese (written in romanji of course, I can only read half the hiaragana and know only the kanji for sun and moon) and understand it better with my limited Japanese vocabulary. I did get some nice information on the increase of effectiveness in art activism but other than those few paragraphs, I didn’t really comprehend anything else.

I always forget how fun it is to do research for assignments when I’m not doing them. There’s something satisfying about it that I can’t seem to convince myself exists when that little version of me in the back of my head is begging me to get started on them. I think it’s a sense of satisfaction that I can back up what I’m talking about. It’s something I thouroughly enjoyed when writing BNE. I did extensive research on the two different time periods. It’s the most I’ve ever worked on a project before. It was also satisfying to fill my project notebook up with substance rather than “this person, that person” and “this is how much I’ve done”.

I prefer to do my research from the library, gathering books and taking notes and having them all on my desk at the same time, open at different sections, but everything is easier and better found online these days. I miss looking books and scattering them on my desk as I do something productive or at the very least constructive. My desk actually looks like that now, but just with notebooks instead. Eight in total and five open, and a ‘to-do’ pad. Instead of actual subject matter books, my research looks like eleven open tabs in Chrome.

I’m almost finished my assignment. And when I’ve done the final draft I’ll close all of those tabs. I don’t bookmark them anymore. It’s too much of a pain to delete the bookmarks.

Well that’s all of my reading for the week… unless you count manga. But I read too much of that to bother with a report on it.