Friday, February 25, 2005
(9:20 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Friday Afternoon Confessional
I confess that I only do fun little time-wasty things like play video games or watch TV in the context of some larger project in which I am procrastinating. Thus, on those rare occasions, such as yesterday, when I somehow completed the amount of work I had set out to do, in a reasonable amount of time, I had no idea what to do.
I remember a comment thread once where someone said (not to me), "You follow blogs at home? Come on, this is something you definitely need to be getting paid to do." I think that's basically right -- blogging, commenting, etc., at least for me, is always a secondary thing, a way of integrating some necessary procrastination into my larger "real" work. That's why my blogging productivity, as well as my comment whoring and my IMing, is always significantly greater during those times (such as now) when I am "officially" writing a paper and when that project establishes a totalitarian regime over my life. Since I had decided that yesterday I would produce five pages and actually produced six, the regime was overthrown. So what were my thoughts? Do I go out to the living room and watch TV with Hayley, or see if she wants to play Nintendo? No, that wasn't what came to mind for me. I was thinking, "Maybe I could read some Kant or Hegel" or "Maybe I should give learning German another try." Instead, I wrote a lengthy e-mail to a friend asking what's wrong with me that I constantly beat myself up if I'm not working and only do entertaining things as part of the rhythm of working -- then read a good chunk of Hegel's Philosophy of History.
It's not simply that I'm not working in a traditional labor-for-wages relationship. That is part of why I sometimes feel bad if I don't do "enough" (meaning a little bit more than I'm actually doing -- bad infinity!) -- I remember back when I was working thirty hours a week, had a longer commute to school, and was taking a full-to-overflowing classload of Karl Barth, Jacques Derrida, Empire, and Systematic Theology, all of which added up to about 500-600 pages a week of reading, and I only had to take one incomplete, in the class in which everyone took an incomplete.
I confess to using the song "Magazine" by Pedro the Lion as a way of deflating every round of self-criticism that comes my way. I first stumbled across this particular usage when I was dealing with some serious jealousy problems in a relationship in which I never felt like I had much control over anything at all. Part of the problem: how can you be so casual when I've told all my friends how excited I am about you and when my parents know about our relationship and....? Yeah, I guess I try to run my life by public opinion polls, believe it or not. All this jealousy, and the anger that came with it, was based on the pride that worried I was going to look like a fool in front of "all those people." The same pride tells me I'd better damn well succeed in this academic route I've chosen, before the encouragement of "You're so smart I'm sure you could succeed in anything" becomes the reproach "You're so smart! You could have succeeded in anything!"
It's a pattern I learned early in the battle of childrearing -- isolate my parents or other potential critic by performing every task set to me promptly and well. I'd get my homework done during class, do all the housework I was assigned right after school -- all my former roommates, you wonder how it is that I not only complain about the messy house, but compulsively do something about it, why I embarrass you by doing your dishes for you? I was folding laundry for my whole family long before I met you, and I was the one who single-handedly trained the damn dog, etc.
I'm oversimplifying the pattern here; I wasn't really perfect -- but the general idea was to fully execute my duty, depriving any possible critics of any leverage, getting everyone else on my side. I'm not saying that it was an unproblematic strategy or that my parents never had valid complaints -- I'm just saying that I was trying to stack the deck in my own favor, trying to stave off the possibility of a real encounter with another person, an encounter that could change something. It's what Pedro calls the "holy quest to be above reproach," and whether he intended it or not, "holy" is especially appropriate there -- "set apart." My noble, solitary approach to owe no one anything.
I thought that I didn't really do pieces like this anymore. I suppose I only have one more thing to confess: last night, during dinner, we all three sat and watched a show on Fox called Stars without Make-up. About halfway into it, I felt like I needed a real-life church confession.
