10 July 2000

Reading:  The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav.

Watching:  The Blar Cam

Today, I had an amazing workout, for the first time really since the London and Calgary trips.  Halfway through the aerobic portion of the workout on the bike, I just got an amazing boost, upped my rpms, and jammed to the Counting Crows.  It was almost like a backpacking ascent, when it feels like the body just has nothing left, and then all of a sudden it gets easy and the brain kicks into overdrive and life is very good. 

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Jonelin has made me the featured link on the Blar Cam page this week!  A big thanks is in order to my cool new friend, who is now IT (the little sick link fest continues).

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The Wall Street Journal editorial page was outstanding today.  I meant to bring home the thing so I could quote some of the editorials.  Oh well.  Blar.

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I spent some time tonight organizing the introduction for this section of the dissertation.  This is the part I mentioned a few entries ago.  I'm using Hayward and Eisenach to establish the Progressive rejection of natural right in favor of  historicism as a theoretical concept -- and I follow in the chapter with examples from Progressives.  Funny, but the introduction is the toughest and slowest part because it sets up the entire argument.  Collecting the examples from Progressives will take a little bit of time, but the writing will not be particularly difficult because everything will have been laid out logically in the introduction and will drive the research and the writing that follows.  This is why I write in bursts.  I take forever to get started and obsess to death over organization and conceptualization -- and then am able to churn out large quantities of high quality writing amazingly quickly.

When that section is done, the chapter will be concluded, and I will have one   substantive chapter left, with two sections:  the first section will illustrate Progressive legal theorists in law journals and elsewhere adapting the arguments of the broader Progressive movement to constitutional law, and the second section will show the Supreme Court actually employing those arguments and overturning the entire classical legal tradition of police powers jurisprudence in favor of the Progressive approach.  I can't wait to get to that last part, because I'll be coasting then.  It's largely a detailed analysis of one Supreme Court decision, and that sort of analytical writing is a piece of cake compared to the writing that will have gone into the dissertation up to that point.  I'm starting to see the end of this thing.  I just need to keep plugging away every night (but Fridays, which I've designated as my nights off).

Enough of this.  I need to spend some time with nuclear physics now!