Researcher's block

As an academic, doing research is a life-long pursuit. It's our passion and we shouldn't feel forced into doing it. The research questions should come naturally as we get more curious about our choice topics. Well, not so much in my case right now.

Don't get me wrong. I love what I study. I'm obsessed with all things politics, on the theoretical level and as a craft. See, the thing is that I do know what I plan on focusing but I'm just not able to come up with a good research question or a thesis. Whenever I stumbled upon a decent question to ask I found out that either the question cannot be empirically answered ("operationalized" in social science term) or there's simply not enough data and sources on the ground.

I wish that this process is as easy for me as it is for other academics. I keep asking myself why is it so hard for me to come up with a simple research question for my dissertation proposal. I think part of it is that I'm currently not living in an intellectually-vibrant environment i.e. university campus and it's so hard to talk to and elicit ideas from people about my research interests. Yeah, I miss being in Madison! If I'm there right now all I have to do is walk into Dr. Mike's office and he'll talk my ears off about what I should be doing for my doctoral study. Or I can go out for coffee or dinner with my many graduate student friends and bounce ideas off of them. Nobody here in my immediate surrounding is remotely interested in my research interests or even if they are somewhat fascinated by my research focus they simply don't know much about the topic to offer any constructive inputs.

Anyway, I should just sleep this off and hopefully it'll come in my dream tonight. It doesn't help much that I've been spending hours watching "The Sopranos" DVD and all I dream about right is the various ways to whack people and eat delicious Italian food with the mobs. I'd say "Fuhgeddaboudit!"