Summer rain, flow and regrets

I'm really on a writing roll right now - both my paper and this blog. I'm in a state of flow, and even though there is no hint of structure (I guess I'll sort that out tomorrow), Ideas are pouring out and onto the pages. It is raining outside, but it's not really as cold as you might expect. I have opened both doors to the balcony of our two-roomer wide, to get all the fragrance from wet leaves , asphalt and earth inside. I would have liked to sit out there, but it's too dark to read, and the power-cable for my computer won't reach. I love summer rain, especially by night. It puts me in a romantic, even pining, mood. Morcheeba on the speakers.

The mood makes me realise that my principal regret in life is a burned hard-disc some years back. I had gotten a labtop, so the loss of hardware was of little consequence, but on the hard drive was my combined creative production - ever. A few years prior to that, I lost my entire portfolio of sketches. I never got back to drawing after that either.
The role-playing stuff, essays and odd ends of fiction in the disc was no great loss, but my songs were. I had taken the time to type in all the lyrics and tabs for songs I had written in my early twenties (mostly about love and summer rain) and even if they weren't that original, I still poured my heart into them. Girls seemed to like them too. I wanted to be a non-semitic gen-x Cohen. Recently I realised that I have forgotten about half of the songs, and those that I do have the printed lyrics for, I forgot how to play. I never got back to writing music, and it breaks my heart...

The cats have been fighting for half an hour now - probably exited by my erratic typing. I'm getting annoyed with the disturbance, and the blood have left my fingers, leaving them ice-cold and numb. The coffe is starting to disagree with me as well...

Upcoming publications

Since I have just gone public (instead of just writing to myself and my own constructed life-trajectory-narrative-whatever...), I might as well do some more self-promotion.
In the year 2006 I will be publishishing the following;

- I am bursting with pride that my paper for the international conference "Origins of religion, cognition and culture" entitled "Religion and the emergence of human imagination" has been accepted for the associated publication. I have made significant progress in my research on the cognitive study and description of imagination since January, so I will have a good deal of writing to do over the summer. Deadline September.

- I contribute two articles on fantasy literature for a book primarily directed at teacher's colleges, first-second year college students, and danish grammar-school (3.g opgaver i gymnasier). One will be on the psychological interpretation and personal and cultural significance of Fantasy-stories, and the other a more political and post-structuralist inspired account of the heroic character in fantasy-fiction (with Frederik Berg Olsen, who will contribute a different angle based on Campbell's Hero with a Thousand faces). Deadline August.

Staying with publications. My recently article entitled "With role-playing in mind - a cognitive account of decoupled reality, experinece and identity", featured in the new Knutepunkt book "Role, play, art" has been very well received indeed, and I am currently looking for a venue of publication for its theoretical big-brother which was presented at "Playing Roles" in Tampere, Finland this March.

Getting there - who cares about individuals anyways?

OK, a little more happy now. I have been writing the name Derrida five or six times, which always makes me feel better. This is remarkable, since I don't understand one word the guy wrote - but then again, nobody does... which is what makes post-structuralist stuff so great for drunken argumens and term-papers...

I am getting intensely annoyed with Danish psychologists because they insist on making up their own words for concepts that already have perfectly good names; social constructivism was used by Piaget in a different sense, so now they use the term "social constructIONism" for what everybody else understands by social constructivism... It might seem a trifle, but I have a gut-feeling (get it?) that those guys are getting on my "to sue for bleeding ulcers"-list.

Cold coffee and sour guts

Why am I getting so frustrated about a tiny weeks worth of term-paper?!? ...I mean, I have loads of publications coming out this year, and my academic carreer is looking good. So, why the hell am I staying up at night, drinking cold coffee and reading textbooks that are intended for first-year students, for a measly week-report? Simple; I enjoy writing and researching stuff when doing it on my own time and terms, and when I have complete power over the content and subject matter. I like to ponder whatever I will write, and suck bits of information and ideas out of everything - from lectures to ps2 games - over an extended period of time. When, on the other hand, I am faced on a paper with a fixed problem and curriculum, and only a single week to do the damn thing, I freeze up. I need time to turn these things over in my head - preferably while drunk in a park with my friends... or working on getting there.
So, here I am, getting all stressed out over somethng that should be easy, while drinking cold coffee (bad, cheap crap, I might add), fighting a lingering headache and getting annoyed with everything; simply because of a simple social psychology paper.
I can't wait 'till the holiday, where I get to work on my own stuff for three months... Did I say holiday...? I need a regular job.