Finally I'm getting on with the thesis proposal. Well, sort of. I happed upon the Barnes & Noble web site and noticed an �out of print� tab on the menu. Rock! I found a bunch of Joan Didion and other books I�ve been stalking for a long time and got inspired to take some more notes on her books The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I came up with a few new ideas and ways of organizing the thesis, such as people who consciously or unconsciously adhere to groups in order to escape the possible meaninglessness of life. She tends to favor those who are conscious in their endeavors -big surprise- over those who are not. But there are several social and political figures that consciously adhere to a set of moral values and use their consciousness to control the people who unconsciously attach themselves to movements, religion or regular old fandom. For example, after becoming Bishop at the Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco, James Pike, American (The White Album), went and �finished� the Cathedral by raising three million dollars to install images of Albert Einstein, Thurgood Marshall and John Glenn, after �streamlining the Trinity� by eliminating the Son and the Holy Ghost, therefore elevating man to God, even above God, in turn elevating himself to God. The thing with Grace Cathedral is that it was always lovingly considered �unfinished� and imperfect by many Californians, as man is. His philosophy was to deal with distasteful things in life�namely wives�by declaring them null, forgetting them and moving on. He wrote a book called If You Marry Outside Your Faith in which he explains the horrible error of doing such. Consider it null no matter what promises you�ve made, forget it and move on. Start over. He ended up dying in a canyon after he and his former student/wife went on a road trip into the Jordanian Desert trying to �experience the wilderness as Jesus had� armed with a few bottles of Coca-Cola. She survived and sang his praises in her vacant way.