Friday, May 12, 2006
(8:10 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Friday Afternoon Confessional: Take me home tonight
I confess that I have a strange anxiety about travel. This weekend is my sister's graduation; I had already said I was going to attend several weeks ago, but only realized early this week that it was coming up so soon. Since then, I have been thoroughly out of sorts. For instance, I spent much of the week not writing a paper. Procrastination is normal, of course, but this exceeded all reasonable levels, especially since I knew exactly what I wanted to write, what passages I wanted to focus on, etc. I really think that the anxiety about an upcoming trip is what did it -- I no longer felt "settled in" at home, and thus I wasn't able to focus on a longer project because of a largely unconscious feeling that I wouldn't be able to finish it before being uprooted (even though, in point of fact, this week was plenty of time to write fifteen pages before leaving Friday morning). More generally, I have been exceptionally irritable throughout the week.Some have proposed that it's specifically a problem with visiting family, but that can't be the case since I had the same levels of anxiety (probably even worse) when I attended the WTS conference in Seattle last year, with my family nowhere to be found. I am usually anxious about going home for holidays, but it does seem to be the travel as such rather than the expectation of any kind of problem or conflict with my family. Some have also proposed that it's due to my working from home over the past year, but I still had the same problem even when I was living in Kankakee and therefore working outside the home and commuting to CTS two days a week -- the routinized travel didn't seem to be a problem in the same way that unexpected or occasional travel is. (I am sometimes even anxious about visiting friends' homes and often attempt to routinize socializing -- for instance, I'll see this person every Thursday, I'll hang out with my girlfriend Tuesday nights and Saturdays, etc.) Plus I always want to go to the same bars, I prefer to study at CTS's library instead of the Regenstein because it feels more like "home" to me, I always go to the same grocery store and get the same things....
I confess that sometimes I want to draw up a specific schedule for my days, particularly with a view toward keeping up languages and working my way through the 20th Century Theology reading list this summer, but I already tend so naturally in that direction that I feel like if I made a conscious, "official" routine, I would never do anything spontaneous again. Should I just give up my state of denial? Is that what's holding me back? After all, Kant only became a great philosopher after he became a person such that people could set their watches based on his walk through town.
Did you know, by the way, that Kant earned a living as a professional gambler for a time when he was young? It's true.
I confess that self-consciously spontaneous people can annoy me deeply. I confess that there is no type of person I am more attracted to. I confess that I can keep up for a while, but it's draining. I confess that once someone has said it's time to leave, I become very impatient to actually go ahead and leave. I confess that when I have to leave somewhat early in the day, but not first thing, I tend to go through various phases of getting ready to leave -- putting on my shoes, then later getting my coat and putting it on a chair rather than on the rack, then later filling up the water bottle I keep with my bag, then later laying out my bag (properly packing it so that there will be room for anything I am using but that I also need to take with me).... I need to feel "ready," apparently.
Back to this paper thing, though -- I confess that I have a math problem. On Tuesday, the first day that I had set aside to write, I wrote zero pages. On Wednesday, I wrote one page. On Thursday, I wrote eight pages. It's pretty clear to me that I am following a classic exponential growth curve and that I'm going to be writing a truly staggering number of pages today. What I want to know is how to figure out a function that approximates this curve so that I can calculate exactly how many pages I'll write today. Engineers of the world, unite!
That's probably enough. What's your confession?
