Summer Review, ugh

Getting worried about reporting progress. Too easily distracted by neat physics.
This summer:

• started to study the strings, needed QFT to really get it.
• started to study QFT.
• QFT has a lot of solid state stuff and irrelevent quantum phenomena, thought I wanted a cosmologists take instead.
• Went looking for quantum cosmology reviews.
• Most papers are too new, I need stuff three degrees of reference back.
• Wrote reference/citation intersection search to find these.
• Old papers dont have references making this not useful except for the third degree articles.
• Read review on non-equilibrium measures of temperature.
• Began reading and decifering older articles. (Guths original inflation, bekenstein's entropy, hawking's area theorem) using Dodelson's cosmology et al.
• Realized this was far from the original objective. How is this going to help find a topic?
• Also realized that many relativity proofs are in the language of topology and set terminology, well duh, but more precisely theyre as clear as mud. Some soul searching here. Should I need a class to learn some of these concepts? Field Theory, Topology, etc Why cant I focus on my own?