June 12, 1999
Manner of Procrastination

It is 11:15 PM and I am sick of reading about scientific revolutions. I am taking a break now before my head explodes. The biggest problem is that I have to read the book slowly to understand what the author is saying and I have to take lots of notes for later. Yesterday Dr. Hatch gave us the assignment for our paper that is due next Friday. Basically we are writing about Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions with respect to the scientific works of Newton. Well, since we haven’t talked about Newton in class yet that makes it rather hard to write about him. There are a few topics that we must discuss in the paper, the celestial theories of Copernicus, Kepler, Brahe, and Galileo for example, but the heart of the matter should be Newton. I guess I can write about some of the topics we have discussed already, but I don’t even have enough information to create a descent thesis yet! This is very frustrating because my first step in writing a paper is to decided exactly what I am going to write about – this involves formulating a good thesis.

I know someone out there right now is saying, “Stop whining, get up off your butt, and do something about it!” Let’s set the record straight – I HAVE been doing something about it. At this moment I feel better venting my anxieties through my diary than reading more of Mr. Kuhn’s work. This guy either has a great vocabulary or his thesaurus needed a rest after he wrote this book. I have had to look up words like “pedagogy” because I had absolutely no idea what they meant. That’s pretty annoying when you are trying to get the main point of the book and the meaning of a word interrupts you. Granted that this wasn’t written for the average person to read, but must it be so superfluous and intellectual? Dr. Hatch said that if we were reading the book correctly we would struggle to get through it. If he was telling us the truth, I must be grasping the concepts REALLY well. It takes me two hours to read forty pages! Does that seem like a long time for such a short section? I think so. I will be very happy to be done with this book – a goal I have set to accomplish before I go to bed tonight. Wish me luck.

The bulk of my day was spent at the beach. I found out that I was going late Friday evening so that’s why I haven’t mentioned it before. We drove over to Crescent Beach this morning, I was driving my car because there were five people and my car has four doors. (I also think Stuart got me to drive because he didn’t want to. Not that I blame him. He has been driving around the state of Florida the past two weekends and he needed a break from the driver’s seat.) The weather was chancy since it rained here in Gainesville yesterday and the chance for rain was good today also. Somehow the portion of beach that we picked didn’t see a drop of rain until just before we left. There were some nasty rain clouds all over the place, but we got blue skies quite a bit of sunshine. I did a good job with the sunscreen again. Besides a little spot on my foot that seems to be sunburned (and we are talking a really little spot) I got no sun at all. Apparently it is too much to ask to even out my horrible farmer’s tan. I am destined to have a white stomach also. Oh well, it could be worse because I would certainly rather be white than sunburned.

The ocean was choppy today due to the strong storms offshore. I love to swim in the water, though, and it is more fun when the waves toss you around. Sometimes I think I was born to swim because I feel more comfortable in the water than out of it! I did fall in the water a few more times than necessary due to Stuart. The biggest problem with a bikini is that they don’t stay in place as well as they should. One of my searches in life is to find a great bikini. (I haven’t found one yet, so if anyone has any suggestions please email me at lyra23@hotmail.com. I really need some help with this one!) Anyway, my bathing suit was a bit uncooperative when a certain gentleman threw me into the water. He was complaining about his suit too. Guys are lucky enough to be able to put on some shorts and pass them as a bathing suit. Girls have to find one that fits, that flatters their particular figure, and that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. That’s a pretty tall order. For females buying a bathing suit is one of the worst experiences possible and to find one that fits those criteria is a dream come true.

Now that I have gone off on several tangents it is 30 minutes later than when I started and I had better get back to work. I will be glad when this summer semester is over and I can relax. I will be posting my finished History of Science paper on my webpage as soon as it is done, if anyone is interested in reading it. Until then send me good studying “vibes” (as my mom says).