Ten Homework Avoidance Tactics

1. Sleeping an hour past the alarm clock.
2. Booking Rail Tickets from Washington DC to New York City.
3. Researching Space Shuttle launches.
4. Signing up for a free Myki card.
5. Cursing the Australian Embassy in Washington's laziness in not assisting its citizens to negotiate the red-tape required for a White House Tour.
6. Internet Banking.
7. Finishing all remaining Christmas pastries in the house.
8. Searching for books that I found last time I looked for them.
9. Moisterising.
10. Discussing the horses of Kyneton and garbage truck disasters on the Great Ocean Road with boys.

I am avoiding trying to decide what it is I am writing my thesis about. As mentioned already, I am looking at Nip/Tuck and The Picture of Dorian Gray. I am getting confused about what it is to actually study literature. In my undergraduateness I would just go to an extreme end of a theory and see if I could argue it. One day I would be a Marxist, the next a Feminist and the next a Formalist. I am a literary chameleon. I like to act and take on the colours of a theory; play around in its skin. I don't actually hold any beliefs. Its the ultimate in fence sitting. Now I feel I have to really have some sort of theory. It's hard. I started wanting to argue something along the lines of the pathological narcissist being the new 'ideal' which people in the Western world aim toward. I seem to want to make comment on the deterioration of society. It seems to come out like a lecture. Now I am thinking along the lines of whether it is considered better, in our here and now, to look good than to be good. And, I am beginning to think that you could argue that individualisation and the self-creation of morals allows for that to be true; that in order to make meaning in the twenty-first century we look to self-creation and decadence as opposed to what is deemed 'naturally' moral--that is what comes from a moral code that proceeds us but is in truth no less 'fake' than this approach. You see, in my sub-conscious this all makes sense. It is just when I try to put it down in words that it starts to sound like someone let me out of a funny-farm.