Friday, May 27, 2005
(7:15 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Friday Afternoon Confessional
When I was a kid, I was always glad when my mom was working. I got a whole afternoon, open and free. I usually did my chores rather quickly, out of a desire never to be told to do anything, and I always felt as though those two or three hours were a time in which I could really do something. Again. Yes, we keep coming up against this same theme. So when my mom would come home, I would inevitably turn off the TV and act as though something was really happening in the house. As I got older and continued this habit, she came to suspect that I was watching pornography on TV, but she was wrong, because there was no pornography available on basic cable -- I ran a few pretty thorough checks.
The point of this story is that it is basically turning out the same with Anthony and Hayley. When they come home, I try to look busy. Anthony usually comes home around 5, it seems, sometimes earlier, so on those very frequent days when I'm home all day, I often take a computer break from 4:00 to 5:30, because I don't want them to find me at home sitting on the computer. Apparently in my mind, they'll think that whatever I happen to be doing when they get home is what I've been doing all day long. And it's very important that I not be idle, in order to redeem this time during which I'm not working -- even though, after registering with three or four temp agencies, sending my resume off for at least twenty different jobs, and putting my name in for Monster.com, as well as mining every possible "connection" I can think of, it is arguably not simply "my fault" that I am not working on any given day.
You may or may not be tired of that specific line of complaint. I definitely am. Yet in a certain sense, I'm glad. A lot of exciting stuff is happening in my life right now, or is at least on the horizon. There's the Derrida translation, the blog book, the possibility of the CTS student-run journal -- plus I'm starting a new phase of my academic career and making all kinds of new connections and starting to develop some confidence in terms of getting my work out there in the public eye -- and if I also got this awesome summer job that could be challenging (or else allow me time to read or blog on the clock) and would allow me to meet most of my financial targets before classes start up, then I would seriously start to worry that I was going to get run over by a bus. In a way, I'm also glad that there doesn't seem to be much on the horizon romantically at the moment.
Imagine -- a guy who pulled himself up by his bootstraps to become an academic up-and-comer, who stumbled into a job custom-tailored to his needs, who has a steady girlfriend -- who could bear to be hated that much? I've always hated "that guy," from deep within my soul. To be "that guy" is unthinkable to me. All my life, the status of "that guy" has been by definition a usurpation -- just as it is impossible to "earn" a million dollars in a year, no matter what one does, so also it is impossible to "earn" the charmed life, the attention of all the girls, whatever. A guy with a beautiful girlfriend is by that very fact probably an asshole -- and if he's demonstrably not an asshole, then he's incredibly boring. The person with the good job is the one who is the person most skilled in sucking up; the one who could actually do the job best is off languishing in some soul-crushing line of work.
Weakness -- I am, after all, a Christian -- weakness is the sure sign of moral virtue. My suffering, such as it is -- never quite enough, I'm afraid -- is in itself God's favor to me. The formula for moral superiority is to have a sense of entitlement, and thus a sense of deprivation, sublated into resentment of those who have that to which one is entitled and a conviction that the possession of such goods is evidence of moral inferiority. I'm hoping to use the parable of the shrewd manager as a lever to get me past this neurosis, but it's hard. I'm becoming a bad person, an ambitious person, a person with confidence and passion. With every good thing that happens to me, it just keeps getting worse.
