Tuesday, January 04, 2005
(1:35 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Forget the New Year
Of late, I have been taking the New Year seriously as a fresh beginning. New Year's resolutions, it seems to me in the last few years, are very important and must be both made and kept. However, in today's postmodern context, the only progress I've been able to make on that front is to feel sincerely guilty for not making a resolution -- just as during Lent, I usually achieve little other than vaguely hoping no one asks me what I've given up (I even eat meat on Fridays sometimes!). The reason is this: my life is in near-constant upheaval. Within the last two years, I have moved into a house and have had the following roommate arrangements:- Me and Richard
- Me, Richard, and (de facto if not de jure) Kari
- Me, Richard, Kari, Brett, and Tara
- Me, Richard, Kari, Brett, Tara, Kevin Crimmins, and (briefly) Josh Hancock
- Me and Kari, with Richard on weekends
- Me all by myself (briefly)
- Me and Justin
- Me, Justin, Jesse, and (on a part-time basis) Carra
- Me, Jesse (w/ Carra), and Jared
I have gone from firmly resolving to stay at Olivet and study with Craig Keen, to the sobering realization that Craig was going to California (should I have moved and gone to Azusa Pacific? Or if he had gone to Nazarene Theological Seminary, should I have gone there?), to a half-hearted school search in which I applied to two theology schools and two English programs, to a conference in which everyone told me that I simply must study philosophy, to a theological seminary in which the first class that I attended was about homophobia (before which I had only consciously met one gay person; I was still sometimes using "gay" as a general term of abuse, as was common practice at Olivet), to a very interesting and intense summer in which I got virtually no academic work done, and now to sitting and waiting to hear back from four theology programs, two philosophy programs, and one literature program. I have stated three separate purposes.
I have been on the verge of bankrupcy the entire time. I took out a personal loan before enrolling at CTS, in order to pay off my credit cards and my bills from Craig's class. I have used the majority of my student loan checks each time to pay off credit cards, which leaves me short again in the lead-up to the next semester, in a self-perpetuating cycle. I have worked a job about which my feelings ranged from resigned "looking on the bright side" to outright hatred to maddening boredom -- all the while remembering substitute teaching, a job that I enjoyed and that allowed me time to read during the day (I was fucking paid to read Seminar XX and Gravity's Rainbow, for example), but that wouldn't pay the bills because I live in an economically depressed region with plenty of aspiring substitute teachers who can't find anything else.
So it's hard to resolve anything. I could say that I'll wait until I'm in Chicago, but that won't help. I'll have two weeks of job searching, then a few months of class -- plus two conferences -- then trying to choose among the different grad schools, hopefully with some interviews to go to, then before I know it I'll have my Master of Arts in Uselessness in hand and only a few more months until I have to move again...
So dear reader, tell me when I get to start over, when I get to turn over a new leaf, when my leaves are constantly turning every few weeks. Increasingly, it seems as though the only consistent thing is the damn computer, as though my "home" is the Internet -- the place I can go consistently, every morning and every night, check in with the family, do a little reading, do a little writing. The switch over to Gmail was crucial for this: I now have a consistent and effective e-mail interface that doesn't rely on any one computer, just as my web page space gives me constant access to all my files. It's nice that I have my own computer, but far from essential, at least until I have to write a paper. And now I have a cell phone, too, so I can carry around my own little space everywhere I go.
In real life, I'm constantly tensing up in anticipation of the next big change -- I'll be fired from my job; I'll have to move; I'll have to find a new roommate -- but in the virtual world, everything is neat and tidy and just how I want it. A lot of times, when I'm "on the internet," it isn't with any particular goal in mind, but rather just to feel comfortable when I'm in an awkward or unfamiliar place. Maybe those Microsoft people were onto something -- maybe the Internet is nothing but a security blanket that we carry around with us for when we need to sulk. Two-year-olds are slaves to routine, conservative in every sense of the word, and yet their world is in continuous upheaval. I complained yesterday that computers try to turn us into two-year-olds -- what if they're just bearing witness to the fact that the informatization of production already has?
And so I propose the following: Resistance today must take the form of adulthood. Nostalgia for childhood, for the special insights of children, for the innocence of a child -- all of these must be rigorously disallowed. The problem is not that we've forgotten the things we intuitively knew when we were children -- the problem is that we've been provided with no means to grow up.
