just another day

well the weather's been nice for that past couple days. Unfortunately I have enough self-control to be able to keep myself from enjoying it much(limiting my basking in the park to a little while on the walk home from the gym) as punishment for my lack of direction with regards to my dissertation. On the other hand I've also swallowed my guilt(again with regards to my dissertation) and booked a flight to Rome, for a couple days to meet up with the little Bro. Should be a good time, I leave the morning of the 13th and arrive around noon, meet Jason, then hang out until 10pm on the 15th when I head back home to continue hitting my head against the wall in the hopes of striking inspiration.
I've been meeting with various people and discussing the dissertation but I only seem to leave the conversations doubting myself and usually more confused then when I entered. It seems that all my interests seem to have an element of abition, that is that I seem to find interests that like to spiderweb and become unmanageable for a master's dissertation, of would just have to be a really good master's dissertation(citations up the wazzoo, and so densely worded that I'm not sure I could actually understand it). I like to think I could handle it but if I weren't able to do it, it would be a big fall. Which leads back to the question I've been asking constantly for the past three years. Is it better to play it safe and live in mediocraty or to take the big risk and either fail horribly or win gloriously? Another problem and probably a more important problem is the possibility of getting into blackbox science(you have a blackbox that does something... say cookies come out one end of it as you put shoes in the other end. You can't open the box and there's no way of seeing into it. So there's no way of proving what's actually happening, so one could say there are knomes which take the footwear as payment for baking their unusually sweet faeces and it would be as good as any other theory you could come up with.) at the same time though, I'm not sure it would be all that bad to do blackbox science. I think I should ask my supervisor. Damn, I like mustard.
One bright note is that I'll be relying on some Blackbox theories to justify the idea of the "absolute man". Unfortunately for you my paranoia has gotten the best of me and I don't feel comfortable spilling the beans of my thesis to the grand unknown of the internet aether. There's a nice photo of the sunset up at the cottage, I know it's probably nothing you haven't seen before but it's better then nothing. At least it brightens the place up some. I think now I'll contemplate having a shower seeing I just returned from the gym. Hopefully I'll return with good news soon.