Studying vs. Imagination

Normally, my attention span for things like studying is tiny (for an uninteresting subject, such as spanish, maybe 15 minutes. For a moderately interesting subject, such as english, I'll put in the effort to read a book. For a very interesting subject, such as math or biology, it's between 0 and 15 minutes). The fact that I can get along in most subjects (everything except spanish, really) without more than the minimum of studying means that this is normally not a problem. However, sometimes it is.

I'll begin with why I have trouble studying for math: There's nothing to study. Once I use a formula enough, I don't need to study to remember it. However, using formulas is so structured as to be useless. If there was something interesting to use them for, I would spend hours working on getting it perfect. As it is, they're just abstracts. Useful abstracts, perhaps, but nothing compared to how much fun writing a program is - it's both practice, and it does something.

For biology, I want to study it. It's a really interesting feild (in fact, contrary to what most people might think, I would prefer bioengineering or cellular engineering as a career to most things that are computer-centric), so much that I can't focus. For example, to study for a rather major test that's coming up in a month or so, I started trying to read the textbook. The beginning is not very interesting. However, what it does do is distract me. I start thinking of what could be done, and then I can't focus on the book. The same thing happened to me yesterday when I was building things that go Fwoom! Someone suggested that building a microbe (probably a fungus) that bursts into flame would be a nice project. It completely distracted me, thinking about possible ways to do it ...

Gah, distracted again. Probably a set of enzymes that seperate carbon, and then move it into a seperate segment of the cell. Maybe, in a larger organism, they could be designed to drop all of the carbon into a sac, which would grow off the organism.

Okay, so it would take a LOT of effort to do. But it would be fun, damn it!