Sunday, July 17, 2005
(6:06 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
I am boring
I should be at a music festival right now. It is summer, I am still young -- I need to be out there, listening to music, getting a sunburn. I don't get nearly enough sunburns. When I go to friends' houses, I become very antsy toward the end of the evening -- unless I'm having a really interesting conversation with a single woman, I start to think about the next day. Do I really want to sleep in late? I've got a lot to do! So I go home, sleep, wake up at 7:30 or so, on the weekend.In reality, I don't want to take my entire weekend reading Clement of Alexandria for hours, even though on a certain level, it's very tempting -- to just lock myself away for a while, to become an absolute hermit. I very seldom turn down social invitations, though. I set a goal for myself: two evenings of socialization per week. This week I fell short, partly due to this awkward stage of having a job but still waiting for the first paycheck, but normally I hit that goal. I seldom make plans, because I don't want to say no to anyone, ever. I try to make myself completely available. Working from home is perfect -- if something comes up, I can always shift my schedule around.
I'm just waiting, trying to create a clearing. I've been led to believe, somehow, that good things will result, if there is a clearing -- even a violent clearing. The messianic clearing, the wrath of God -- in all that New Testament stuff I keep thinking about for some reason, there's this idea that is really quite bizarre. If the whole thing just comes falling down -- and to some degree, we're led to believe that it's just going to fall down by itself, which wouldn't be so different from God bringing it down -- then something good will come. We can see this in Walter Benjamin as well, the critique of violence -- the divine violence that clears away the law is desirable, because once we clear away what I would broadly call "civilization" (in a reading that one scholar at least has called "forced," so take it for what it's worth), then something good will happen. Real life will happen.
I don't believe that Jesus is coming back any time soon, nor that America is set to fall -- that's the really appalling thing, that this can go on for a lot longer. But I live by my messianic instincts in my own little way. Every month I pay my bills promptly, or at least as promptly as possible. I try to get every requirement out of the way as fast as possible -- even little requirements, like doing push-ups every day, or making my bed, or drinking my three cups of coffee, or whatever. And once everything's done, then -- real life will happen. Something good will happen. Like once I've finished all the required reading, so that I can get my PhD, so that I can maybe find an academic appointment, and do the research I need to do so that I can get tenure -- then, when I'm all done, really cool stuff will happen! It's kind of like how once I finish my semester, then I'm going to read all kinds of cool stuff during the summer! What? I don't know -- but cool stuff. Like blogs, as it turns out.
Still, the goal is to be finished. How horrible would it be if that person I'm expecting came into my life, but I was too busy?
I could take this from another point of view, however: what function does procrastination play in this? I've set myself the goal of spending an hour per subject on my current "interests": an hour of German, an hour of French, an hour of church fathers. That's pretty easy, only three hours. If I really put my mind to it, I could probably get all three out of the way before lunch, then work the rest of the day on my report-writing, then have my evenings free, completely discretionary. Yet somehow these "three hours," at least on days when I'm not working on reports, expand to fill whatever space is available: I read a paragraph in German, then go check my e-mail, make my next move in e-mail chess, then read another paragraph, managing to squeeze an hour of German into four hours. It's even worse with church fathers, and in fact, most days I don't even start with them because I know it's just going to end up taking twelve hours to spend an hour on church fathers, and I don't have time for that. Not even I have twelve hours in a day for Clement of Alexandria!
How boring! How dutiful! It's predictable enough, but here it is: I floss, usually every night. It's a good thing to do, right? I was told that if I did it, good things would result. Nothing much has resulted, actually, but I still keep doing it, because if I didn't, and then bad things happened, it would be my fault. But let's say that I was sick of being the kind of guy who flosses. Time for a personality renovation! I couldn't even not floss like normal people don't floss. I would be not flossing out of some perceived duty to be a normal person or not to put off people with my dutiful responsibility -- as though everyone sees me and sees what I do and thinks that in the very act of, say, flossing, I am implicitly judging people who don't floss.
I'm not judging them. Honestly, I do think that if people want to floss, or claim that they think they "should," then they should just go ahead and actually do it. It's not hard. You bleed the first couple nights, but then you're good to go. It takes thirty seconds, and most people have thirty seconds to spare -- in fact, it's easy to floss while watching TV or doing a variety of other non-hand-requiring tasks. Easy. Just like how if you wish that you were neater and tidier, or if you think you "should," then you should actually just clean stuff up. Do the dishes a little more often or something. It's not hard. It doesn't take a lot of time. That's the problem with these people, though, is a lack of follow-through!
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person in the world with any follow-through, and my follow-through isn't even all that great (see above, re: Clement of Alexandria). We are a bunch of lazy people, always on the verge of a major transformation that will never come -- and we hate the people who seem to achieve that, to break through to real life, because their existence, the very fact that they are, actually is a judgment on the rest of us. All those people with "passion" who achieve great things through discipline and sacrifice are better than us! They do not have anything inside of them that is special or different -- they are just people, and they show not only that more is possible, but that we know what that "more" is and how to go about doing it. (Romans 1, for anyone who's interested -- it's not about natural theology, it's about this.)
To some, I have the appearance of one of those people, but I'm not one of them. I've got a pose, just enough to put people off, to create a clearing -- so that someone can puncture through it. Thinking I'm wonderful is not the way to do that. Telling me I'm smart and how much you admire the work I do and how you're sure I'm going to do great things -- that's not the way to get straight to my heart. It's an implicit judgment of me, because I'm not what you think I am. I'm actually quite boring, quite monotonous, just stuck in my little circle of getting shit done and waiting for something to happen as I hope it never does.
