counting down
8 days out. The laundry list just seems to get longer as the time to get it all done closes in. It's a little claustrophobic, but it's part of what I usually go through before I travel somewhere. On top of that, sometimes just the idea of picking up and leaving is intimidating. You would think the anxieties are things you overcome after doing it a couple times. Some of it really just becomes routine. I guess that's what makes traveling what it is.
And in this grander scheme of things, it's part of what makes the actual research only half the adventure. This sum of so many logistical things. Like getting my shawl dry-cleaned. Anticipating my sleeping patterns. Believe me when I say these are relatively the smallest of things, but they still matter. The real anxieties, naturally, stem from those things that are out of my control. Will people and situations come through for me as I hope they will? Will British Airways PLEASE not go on strike? There are only so many things I can prepare for on this side of the Atlantic.
On the research side of things... Since I cut out the comparative side, I had to redefine again what I was investigating. Not as easy as it sounds. Some things sound great in your head and then not so good on paper, as I found in the first design go-around. But I think I am getting it.
I went off on a tangential during my lit research a few days ago. I came across game theory as a framework for the interactions that I would be observing in the souqs, and it was just fascinating. But the fit would have required too much, and the potential to misinterpret something was too great, so I had to let it go. It's still cool to think that I could probably write a whole separate paper from the point of view of a different field, that is, provided that I could read math, and had ever taken a class besides statistics that applied math to something other than physics.
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