Friday, March 25, 2005
(7:52 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Friday Night Blogging (with Saturday and Sunday updates)
I have written before on the shame associated with blogging on the weekends, particularly at night. I am fast approaching the 8:00 boundary, after which blogging becomes officially and ineluctably pathetic. Or does it? See, I have an excuse -- the electrician is rewiring my house. It takes a long time, and I have to be here the whole time. I'm stuck here all night, much against my will of course. It's like a get out of jail free card, graciously releasing me from the panic I feel every weekend at the prospect of not being sufficiently young, fun, and sociable.I'm also getting a lot of work done on my thesis. I could conceivably be done by the time I go to bed tonight -- there's nothing like translating a text and then letting one's argument on it simmer in the back of one's mind for a couple months in terms of producing some really good work as soon as you sit down to write. After that's over with, I can devote my full attention to this.
Or to getting a job, I guess.
SATURDAY MORNING UPDATE: The first draft of the final section of my thesis was completed last night. Earlier this week, I had set a goal that the concluding section would be fifteen pages long. I have class on Tuesday, so I thought I could do five pages a day Wednesday through Friday and be finished for the weekend. Here's how the schedule went:
- Wednesday: I formatted the document that will contain all parts of my thesis. I used section breaks. I used styles in a disciplined manner. I was able to generate an automatic table of contents. The text of the title page and the table of contents is centered vertically -- not as a result of repeatedly pressing enter and "eyeballing it," but because I set it up so that the program would center it for me. The introduction takes up pages i-vii, and the translation starts at page 1. It is truly a work of art -- the result of over a decade of intense training in the most advanced features of Microsoft Word. For a long time, this seemed like enough work for the entire day, even though it took only a half hour, but late in the evening, I hit a streak and produced three pages, rather quickly.
- Thursday: Reading over what I'd written, I decided I needed to delete two pages, and was able to produce one page after that. For those keeping score, my net progress for this day was the loss of one page. According to the original plan, I should have been up to page ten, rather than page two, at this point.
- Friday: In a marathon session starting at approximately noon and ending at 11:00PM, I produced thirteen pages of rigorously argued and thoroughly documented critical commentary on my translation, clarifying its place in the work to which it was added and in Derrida's thought as a whole. In a few days, I will of course go through and thoroughly revise it, but for now, my lack of distance from it and the fact that I was working on it for eleven hours straight -- during which I was nourished only by green tea and a bowl of ramen -- make it feel like it's really, really done.
SUNDAY MORNING UPDATE: Turns out the electrician disconnected the blower for our heat on Friday. The temperature in my bedroom is subject to wild swings, so on Friday night I thought nothing of the fact that it was a little colder than usual. But all day Saturday -- man. That sucked. The thermostat thing said it was 60 all day, which makes for a beautiful day if you're outside, but feels utterly frigid in your house. I "toughed it out," though, in the interests of not having some guy in the house tearing things apart, carrying ladders around, etc. This morning, though, was the end of that. The thermostat said 56, and although I have this weird ascetic thing where I'm willing to tolerate having no heat in the house, it seemed really rude not to get this taken care of before Anthony and Hayley got home from visiting their parents for the weekend. Turns out, it was something he was able to fix within five minutes, without even entering my apartment. I'm an idiot. But in about a half hour, once the house gets back up to a reasonable temperature, I'll be a warm idiot at least.
Coetzee's novel Waiting for the Barbarians has been sitting on my bedside table for a month and a half now, unread. For whatever reason, for the past couple months I've been falling asleep the instant my head hits the pillow. Last night, though, I couldn't get to sleep, and within three pages, I was hooked. That will be how I spend my day, actually reading a novel for the first time in a long time. Then, God willing, on Monday I'll post about something that people will actually care about.
