Footnote City

Thanks to the Easter weekend, which works out to four days at St. Martin's University, I am almost caught up with the assignments. The Bioethics paper is in the hands of the professor and the gods, the American Dream presentation is planned, The Vicar of Wakefield and Women Beware Women are read and considered, all the class notes for the semester are sorted, the reader response for the American Dream class is written and critiqued by a professor, the poem for the American Dream presentation is written, the reading for Japanese history and the notes for the Japanese geography test are done, the summer school application is written out, and the materials for tomorrow's embryonic stem cell debate in Bioethics are printed out and ready for highlighting for use as talking points. Oh, and I bought some groceries.
So why am I telling you all this? The main idea is totally to make myself feel better about the fact that I am stuck at the very beginning of the first of two (2) papers on Renaissance plays. The short one of the two is due Thursday, I think, and it is not springing to mind the way the paper about The Vicar of Wakefield is. Not being able to come up with an argumentative thesis is no surprise, but I can't even come up with anything I want to say about anything.
Could this be writer's block? It could be. Writer's block is so unfamiliar to me that it feels like a luxury. A writer who is being paid by the hour or the story or the word, for that matter, can't really afford to be blocked up. A radio news editor once told me, "Start at the middle or at the end, but write that bastard because it's going on the air in 15 minutes!" He actually used more words than that, but I'm trying to spare your dainty sensibilities. Anyway, deadlines help, unless you stay up all night trying to meet them. Then you just write crap.
Besides being from eight to fifteen pages, this paper must also have ten sources. Why ten? Why not? When I finally make professor, I'm looking forward to setting arbitrary goals, too. I think I'll assign at least one scholarly research paper to be based on articles in the Seattle Weekly. Not the Stranger, though -- that would be easy: way too much pathology.