It's tough to sort out the mixed feelings between the lingering fatigue of the code-making process from 10:30 to 3:30pm today, the apparent loss of competence, and the misallocation of cognitive resources. I first emphasize the fatigue here because I had to work well above my ceiling later today as well for PSYC 51 discussions, which might nip me in the late afternoon tomorrow if the loss of sleep doesn't get to me first. Although the coding process deeply tested my understanding of the participants, I also felt straight up wrong talking about half of the selected quotes, live interpretations, and codes. It didn't feel very reflexive (as in, holding ourselves accountable to our personal backgrounds and knowledge going into the data) at all, and if I had to lead groupwork as a grad student onboarding fresh members, I would've provided codebook methods. I felt a loss of my competence because I couldn't lean on my interpretive zettelkasten skills of repeatedly abstacting from a highly meaningful quote (into an index, into a declarative title) or making sophisticated, narrative or lateral links to other quotes. Over the course of discussion, I suspect I spent most effort repeatedly shifting paradigms to a more pure developmental paradigm, rather than smoothly updating my cogsci priors and discrete representationalist conjectures. One part of me says the discomfort, immersion, and fatigue is the point, and that I'm doing fine. Another part of me says, I lost most of the interesting codes that could be in the quotes because I could not defer to a more textual, conservative, and/or cogsci interpretation. I think my personal takeaway here is that it's surprisingly expensive to be open-minded; I became more argumentative and fixed in some interpretations by hour 4 or 5.
"[Growing up] is hard and nobody understands." // https://www.homestuck.com/story/2391