I am Jack's throbbing headache

I have finished going through every issue of The American Sociological Review and Social Forces for every article with the keyword "crime" from 1990-2007. I pulled every abstract, and then read every abstract and removed it if it wasn't something I felt I could use on the exam in any way, and if I did keep it, made notes about where I might use it or where else I might encounter it (i.e., ASR has a lot of articles that were used in my Soc of Interpersonal Violence seminar). This came out to be 50 or so more articles that I have to sort through, though not all of them are new to me. I have to go through these again and make another round of cuts and place them in the context of all of the other articles I have already.

I found a couple of really good life course articles, one talking about military experience as a life course transition and another talking about the life course perspective in general. I also found a ton of stuff on race and social dis/organization, which my notes have been lacking on. I also found a good piece on quantitative versus qualitative research, which I needed something in. I think these past couple of days have been very worthwhile, as I have strengthened my resource base in several areas. I have a ton of notes that other people have collected and things like that, but they haven't been very helpful to me thus far. I can only stare at things so much, and it's not helping me to study like that.

Next up, I go through the journals Criminology and Research on Crime & Delinquency for the past 5 years in total and pull everything that might be useful. Then I take everything from these four journals that I've kept plus everything from several classes (thankfully I have brief article outlines that I used as study guides for other exams!), and then it's a matter of organizing everything again and categorizing it by theories of crime and by correlates of crime.

And then I start writing practice answers.

This test isn't until the middle of August.

Ugh.