When research yields a WTF?

The structure of my final Sweet Oblivion story seems to be baffling me. Did I start too soon? Too late? What is the conflict? What is the theme? And why am I suddenly psyching myself out about it? (Because it's the last one, obviously...)

So I decided tomorrow is going to be a brainstorming day, and being the geek that I am, I decided to look up brainstorming on Wikipedia just in case I could pick up some exquisite tip that hadn't occurred to me.*

After reading through the whole deal about various