sunday's turning point

i did it. yesterday i started my AMP1 essay. that's a turning point. i have a whole bunch of quotations from my lecture notes and 4 books to use to draft my essay. i chose the topic of discussing "individual and group differences in musical preference with regard to social and biological influences." and while i think this is a HUGE topic because then you have at least 4 veins to cover, my brain can handle it since it's social in nature. and i like musical preferences in general (so hopefully it might help me come up with a dissertation topic as well. in fact i started a list of ideas for that yesterday also.)

i also found that i could focus on that for longer stretches of time than just straight reading of chapters of books. for while i was using the books i've read so far, i could easily reference my notes and continue working because there was a purpose to my search. it took me a long time to go through SPM, but i found a lot of references. and by making the list, i can use that to frame my work and it is detailed enough if i need to go back specifically somewhere in the book. hopefully this plan works well.

this morning i've meant to finish up finding references in DPoM, but as you can see i've been sidetracked by facebook and now the blog. i did, however, clean my room already; so that's promising. and i think if it's stopped raining, i'll go walk my laundry over to start that process as well.

i also discovered some great music in my itunes collection and watched a bunch of mad men episodes. i'll attribute blame to mandi for me adding that show into the mix. :) but i do like season 1 so far...