Thesis Week One
A baguette is to a cartoon grocery bag as a giraffe is to art depicting Noah’s arc.
- Me
I have so many thoughts about thesis, and if I want it to be good I can’t do all of them. If I want it to be really good I have to choose just one idea. And then cut the scope in half. And maybe in half again. My challenge is to allow myself to let go of certain ideas and preconceived notions of success. I also have to let go of the implications my thesis will have once I leave ITP. I can’t possibly predict what will have success in the outside world and by catering to some hypothetical hiring entity I would probably actually sabotage myself.
My mind goes in two directions when I consider thesis. At the moment I wish there were more because I’d love to have a bigger pool of things to eliminate. That would allow me to practice killing my darlings and choosing between two things is harder than choosing one out of five things.
Here’s what I have:
Designing learning tools to teach children philosophy. This one is the obvious. It almost feels like a cop out that this is one of my two ideas because I wrote about wanting to do this in my admissions essay. Should I have grown at all and found new interests? Or is it a good sign that this is the right direction to go in because I’ve been interested in it for a long time. Honestly a wee little bit of me wishes my interests had evolved and I wanted to do something I never even knew existed before coming here. I have a passion for philosophy. I have a unique background at ITP and I would love to bring some of that into my thesis. Does it have to be so literal? I mean, I carry philosophy around with me wherever I go. It influences every observation I make and likely every word I say. Literal is good too. I taught children philosophy when I was in undergrad. I know what philosophy gave to me, I saw what it gave to those kids, even though our time together was limited. It would be a valuable experience for me to design an educational product for children, testing it on children, and especially iterating on that.
Something amorphous and vague about bodies and femininity and suss out whatever it is that connects the aesthetic in my tumblr when I was 19 years old because my tastes have not changed. Just because I’m writing the least about this one doesn’t mean it’s lower priority. It is just very sticky and abstract.
I did think of a third thing. Turns out it isn’t easier to choose between more than two.
3. Something with writing or text based art. I think writing is the most distinguishing skill I have. I’ve exceeded my 10,000 hours in writing, each essay I wrote probably took me around that amount of time. I’ve agonized over every syllable, scrapped entire essays 5 pages in, and found my voice. Sometimes when the mood strikes just right I feel like Mozart composing a symphony. In the movie montage, words are flying around my head as I type, just as music notes fly around his in a hypothetical movie adaptation of his life.