How I get work done, apparently

From a friend's blog (knowing her nature, she probably wouldn't want me to link it, so I won't):

"this is how ruth writes her papers. :p

it's like magic.

jkkkkkkkk don't kill me! haha."

And then from my profile picture on fb:

"This is how I find my sister 'studying' :-P" -my sister

So apparently my studying gets done by me sleeping. ^^;; It's true though - when I concentrate a lot or too much, I (sadly) get really sleepy. So what happens? I take a nap. Or, as of late, play Tetris Battle. It helps me process what I just learned (I actually mean that in all honesty). There was this study done where researchers had a group of people do a hard math problem and gave them the same amount of time to solve it with one group sleeping in between that and the other group just staying up and trying to work through it. The group that slept got to the answer faster. Pretty much what they said happened is that while you sleep, your brain makes connections that it normally wouldn't while awake so sometimes solutions to problems will arise from sleeping. This is also why people sometimes have really weird dreams.

Anyway, I did a quick search online and it seems that the study has been replicated (I think the one I read was done by Northwestern) but the one I found online is here.

So that thought aside, the sad truth is that although I "study" in this manner, in the end, what happens is I get very little studying done and hope that somewhere in the recesses of my brain, I'll have remembered the material. -_-;; Thankfully I do absorb a lot during class and thus have less to study, but it doesn't change the fact that I have become extremely unproductive at studying.

This article thankfully helped me realize that I really do enjoy what I'm doing, and that I'm just not used to being happy "working." This I think is in part because I still very much subscribe (however unconsciously) to the Marxist idea of "estranged labor" in that the work I do is not who I am and that outside of work is where I need to define myself. However, this fails when I am trying to do work that I enjoy because I cannot alienate myself from my work and truthfully, I don't want to divorce myself from it. So it's a growing/learning process to force myself to do the things that I like (as paradoxical as it sounds).

Btw, to explain "estranged labor," it's summed up pretty much by "I live to work and I work to live." The self (in what makes a person human and what defines the self, which Marx says are the activities one does) has been denied, objectified and alienated because the work that one does is not an expression of the self (nor does the person feel any kind of connection to it and in the same token, does the person have ownership of such work) and so by doing work that is not one's own, one actively participates in what Marx called the "mortification" of man (pretty much you are slowly killing yourself by doing work that you do not feel ownership of). It's kind of a given nowadays that the work one does is separate from the self but Marx points this out and I agree that there is something inherently wrong with that.

Anyway, it's kind of all over the place because I think that I still have some tweaking to do (in what I've learned - I think I'm still kind of off-target in my accuracy in describing Marx and other things I've learned so far) but (poor explanation aside), what all this thinking boils down to is that I need to stop stressing/worrying about my grades and simply execute/live because I am working to live in a way that will define who I am and not as a means to simply exist (as Marx roughly put it).