Time

Good words! Good advice!

The distance must be so difficult (!), which is all the more reason to take your professor's words to heart. They have to be available for us as we will eventually have to be available for other grad students down the line.

I really liked what you said about accurate planning -- in all senses of the words. The "snippet" strategy seems very useful in that regard. I think I'll add other elements in addition to time and content to my planning phases. That $300 poem experience really got to me. Ouch! So, discovering our own particular patterns in combination with abilities, needs, strengths, weaknesses, etc. The race car metaphor could work. If Time = Distance/Speed, then how much time we have (or need) to spend on a given task is dependent not only upon how many pages are entailed, but also how fast we can go through those pages. There's always a use for physics! I wonder if there is a way to take car repairs, detailing, and oil changes into account as well. :)

I was just talking about this in reference to Frederic Jameson (Good Enough Woman, you might remember). I was amazed that I spent hours over two days to get through one article. It was a great experience because I broke through to better understanding of the material by not relying on secondary sources to explain it, but I'm going to need to plan for things like that. Thirty pages of theory might take two days whereas an easy 200-page novel like Gatsby could take a short afternoon... hmmm. I'm going to have to identify all the impenetrable texts and plan accordingly.

My wall of shame addition: By a week from Tuesday, I'm going to meet up with my Romantics advisor and work out more of my Radical Romantics list.