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   My travails into the world of thesis-writing has led me to believe that I am an antiestablishmentarian.  So says my old Philosophy professor, whom I consulted with a few days ago.  "Talking to you," he said, "gives me the impression that you're very much against structuralist thinking."

   My problem with much of structuralism and post-structuralism is that it is obfuscating: bastardizing theory into its most rudimentary and simplest arguments is one thing, but it all begins with understanding the theory first.  It is this requirement that makes structuralism so challenging: it is anything but simple reading.  I was just done with Gaytari Spivak's preface to her translation of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology, and I can confidently say that I still don't understand a damn thing.  I think a second reading of the 90-page preface is necessary before I engage in the reading of the actual text.

   My review of literature, in retrospect, is extremely horrifying to read: I'll take you to a reading of Edward Sapir at one point, and then I'll lead you to Roland Barthes.  In my home computer, I have appended a reading of Charles Taylor: philosophy students will laugh at the very idea of putting Barthes and Taylor in the same sentence, and then have the possibility of Derrida in it.  Of course, another teacher of mine recommends hermeneutics: which means I'm reading Spivak's preface (just the preface) and Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method tomorrow.

   Some of my friends are telling me that maybe I should slow down, and I'm taking it into account, only to go back home and look at so much work to be done.  This is, after all, science: continuous discovery is also continuous work.  Even the smoke-breaks I accord myself after a particularly harassing day of reading are spent in thought.  If anything, I experience a sense of fuflillment: that I've found completeness in the incompleteness of discovery.

   Or maybe I'm just doing something I happen to really, really like.