Thursday, December 23, 2004
(6:29 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
I've got reservations
This evening I decided not to leave for Michigan until tomorrow morning. I was not even packed when I got home from work, and all I'd had to eat all day was a bowl of cereal. Stress was a factor. Now, a whole evening stretches before me -- it will end with a marathon viewing of the final disc of 24, season 3. I'm worried about Michelle, but since she's white, she'll probably survive.Until everyone starts coming over to become stressed out and yell "You've got to trust me on this!" at each other, I have an unexpected open space. When such a space confronts me, my first move is usually to clean up the house -- nothing major, just the dishes and a little sweeping. Jesse says that I'm clean but flexible, and he's right, although occasionally I need to assert some control over my surroundings, make my mark on my space. When I had the house to myself most weekends while Richard still lived here, I would do cleaning of some kind every Saturday morning, as a way of claiming the space and time for myself. I don't clean every weekend anymore, because my roommates are likely to be home and I don't want them to feel any kind of guilt for not helping. I've felt quite enough of that kind of guilt and don't need to inflict it on others.
What will I do with this time? Certainly some French, a half hour of "French" at least: Passolini's Saint Paul seems the most likely. Perhaps some Badiou after that, in translation. The weakness of the dollar has complicated my devious plot of smuggling in French philosophical texts through Canada.
John Wesley awaits eventually, but not tonight. He's waited this long, and he can wait a while longer. As long as I'm reading either Badiou or Wesley, I am arguably making progress toward that damn paper (working title: "Smoke and Mirrors: A Badiouian Reading of Wesley"), and Badiou is more fun. Perhaps I've put too much pressure on myself. In the back of my mind, the thought lurks that I will have failed if not all of my "major" essays from the MA have been sent into journals by the time I graduate. Now I'm thinking of doing the Derrida translation as a separate exercise, then doing my old idea (codename: "clusterfuck") for the real thesis. And of course, German classes are available for next semester or the summer.
Reading French is genuinely satisfying, as is studying philosophy and, to a lesser extent, theology. Even Wesley should be fairly interesting. It's just these damn deadlines, this internalized pressue to produce! I'm not even in an actual PhD program yet. And when I see the contents of a PhD program, I can never space it out in my mind. I don't think in terms of taking two or three courses a semester for a couple years, then studying for exams, then taking a few years to pound out the dissertation. I think in terms of getting all of it done within the next couple weeks. Perhaps my youth prevents me from having a realistic concept of time. The same thing happens with a course syllabus: when I first read it, in my mind, all of it has to be done within a week, including the paper.
One day while Brett and Tara were living at my house due to forces beyond their control, I was talking to Tara about starting habits. I am reluctant to start new routines because I always think in terms of the rest of my life -- "Great, now I have to do this every day, forever." Looking very serious (or, rather, looking like she was trying to look serious), she said it must be exhausting to be me -- a perfect Tara moment. Talking to Lauren one morning in the Salonica in Hyde Park, she mentioned that Ted Jennings has a daily ritual of getting French toast and coffee there. I said that I could never do that, at least not until I had settled down in a career. This time, the problem wasn't that the ritual would be an imposition, but that circumstances might force me to be unfaithful to it. I didn't want to make a promise I couldn't keep, even if it was a tacit promise to myself to eat at a certain restaurant every day. At least part of the reason to go home for Christmas despite having just been there last week is to keep up my unbroken streak, to reassure myself that I can at least do this one thing with some consistency.
Worse than starting habits is stopping habits. People quit things entirely too much -- we are addicted to kicking habits. I drink an unhealthy amount of coffee, particularly when I have a lot of work to do, but I don't want to quit -- I don't want to make up my mind never to drink coffee again. Or church. It took me forever to work up the nerve to miss church, because that would mean breaking my streak, would perhaps even mean starting a new habit of not going to church. The same with writing in my journal -- if I don't do it every day for a long stretch, I would rather not do it at all.
But next year: Thanksgiving, yes; Christmas, no. I can't do it any longer. The useless presents, the wasted money, the expensive clothes that make me feel awkward, the horrible overkill of my little cousins' presents, the memories of being a plotting little kid who could absolutely count on what he was getting for Christmas and never learned to be surprised or grateful (what was there to be grateful for? I had already added each gift to my mental inventory of stuff before opening it), the feeling that I was constantly letting someone down by not demonstrating my excitement in obvious ways, etc., etc.
I need some time off, maybe -- not that that has ever solved anything, not really. I'm still young, but nothing has ever really gone away. My memory is just too good -- it makes me a good bookkeeper, maybe a good academic someday, but that's about it.
