morrisseyed

i’m having one of those “i’m so tired i could puke” sort of evenings.  it is the end of a rather busy week (a rather busy three weeks, actually), and I’d be quite content to sit here on the couch the rest of the night and be sleepy.

work and school has kept me busy latelly.  i sometimes wonder if i bit off more that i could chew by maintaining this marking contract through this term.  but it looks like beggars can’t be choosers since several of the participants i grade have being “moving on” these past few weeks.  “moving on” could mean that they don’t want to be in the course anymore, but given the stuff going down in various financial markets right now, and also the fact that i am working with people who themselves work with these markets, “moving on” means some of these people walked away or have been asked to leave or have simply disappeared.

My own income is guarenteed until november or so - i grade what i need to grade and then bill the Co. for my hours worked.  But then there are these participants, who are working so hard to straighten out their grammar in the midst of a giant mortgage and credit crisis, and almost all of their jobs are on the line through because of the work of others whose hands are still quite dirty.  And then there are those people who have already done the “moving on” bit, like I said.  M.W. or K.P. no longer submit work because they’re moved on, but their names remain on the gradesheet to remind me of their former presence.  I sometimes wonder what they’re up to.  It’ not like I knew what they were up to before - i only grade people on grammar - but all the same, now i know there are three more people I have met in the world who now do not have an income.

things are well.

in the past while, i’ve networked, met, brainstormed, and debated with (too) many people from (too) many disciplines and fields.   The programme is keeping me busy, and assignment duedates are beginning to appear on the horizon, but it’s a nice kind of busy.  unlike this time last year - the second week into the programme, i’m not stressed out beyond the highest levels that the gauge will measure.  i’ve encountered a lot more faculty support for the students and for the programme itself.  and the students are a good bunch, too.  pretense is low and collegiality is high.  do i feel welcome?  yes, i do.

i’ve also found part-time work in the field.  i’ve been hired to work at the reference desk of my alma mater doing, well, reference stuff.  The shift is on Saturdays from 3 to 7, so I understand that I won’t be too busy, but I do expect it to be “busy enough” for me to put a few things learned into practice; hopefully I’ll get a good feel for how things work on the other side of the desk.  From a pragmatic point of view, i think it will help me out when it comes time to find a placement for the summer practicum (i.e. three weeks of unpaid work).  Although I’ve managed a lot of things and worked in the broad field of “information literacy” for many years now, none of my experience has been in an actual library - hopefully these four hours a week for twenty-four weeks will look good enough to on c.v. for a nice placement somewhere in may 2009.

picking up this shift meant that i had to work, again, my last shift of work at the local tourist dive.  i’ve left this place four or five septembers in a row now.  last september, and the one before that, i was real happy to be rid of the place.  i don’t like working there at all.  but having gone back to work a shift or two every week this past summer, i’ve come to really appreciate my co-workers.  i have some genuine life-long friends there who I’ve tended to overlook because of my one-track scholarly mind (surprise surprise).  The previous year, the year of my MA, perhaps the most frustrating year of my life (but definitely the year of my life which i was most hungry), I grew to be really annoyed by the pretense and arrogance of academics.  i’m pretentious and arrogant myself, i know that.  But I try my hardest to curtail this arrogance.  and for the most part, most academics do,too.  academics aren’t bad people by any stretch of the imagination.  but Academics, as in the culture of academics, specifically the culture of the humanities, is such an insular field.  we argue the hell out of anything.  and i wholeheartedly avow the fact that everything in this world must by argued to death - some one must be critical.  and i’m glad i can be critical of everything.  without trying to sound arrogant, i’m pretty darned happy of my ability to see things differently from most other people.  but what’s the use of seeing things different from others if you don’t spend time with others?  when the Ivory Tower Syndrome sets in, I grow uneasy.  And that’s how the MA was working out.  So, it was very nice to go work at the tourist dive again, and to see other who are as smart and intelligent and cultured and happy and nice and similar as my peer group back at grad school, but different enough to give me a breath of fresh air.  i’m a working man, a union man to the end.  i still identify with “common people” (scare quotes to refer you the statements and fun that Jarvis Cocker and Pulp were making), even though i’m no longer “common”.  My co-workers at the tourist dive aren’t “common people”, either.  there is no such as thing as “common people” or “common”.  but in my co-workers i found - nay, rediscovered - some friends and a sense of self I had lost or strayed away from.

This sense of self is more simple.  it’s a sense of self that is rooted somewhere in aiming for happiness or contentment as opposed to wisdom as a life goal.  this doesn’t mean i’m going to stop reading.  it means i’m going to redirect my attention back to the theme of one of my favourite texts, as opposed to talking about the theme of my favourite texts (and there is a big difference.  so meta).  I often refer to lucretius’s nature of things (which Suzuki refers, to, as well, in the name of his programme).  it’s a damn old text, and i read it a damn long time ago, back in the mid-90s.  after lucretius pontificates about various scientific things like the nature of the atom (he coined the term, if i recall), he writes that at the end of the day he just wants to find contentment, find some peace by leaning back on an olive tree and watching the sun set with his dog by his side.  or something like that.  it’s a moving moment.  lucretius spent 200 pages going on about hard science, being academic, literate, pontsy, and cerebral.  But he finishes it all off by saying it doesn’t matter if you can’t be happy.  that’s the aim.  find the olive tree.

one of my closest friends, Will, has always wanted buy an olive grove and to retire to greece.  Will would tell me this when we were 19 and 20.  I heard then the fun and contentment in his voice, and saw what he longed for.  but i didn’t understand its depth then.  i don’t know if he completely understood it then, either, but looking back on it, i think he was closer to this understanding than i might have been.  Will’s always been able to contextualize things better than me. he’ll tell me time and again how smart i am and praise my ability to link x with y and then back to a and b.  but in some ways it’s meaningless - it’s coming close to useless, if one can’t understand how it all works in the long run.  could Will see to the age or 60 back in 1995, 1996, an 1997?  I don’t think so, but I do realize he could look beyond our own feeble and youthful years to understand that there is a whole world out there.  I don’t think either of us could properly interact with the world then, but i think he had a better sense of its existence, at least.  understanding its existence is the first step, and then understanding how to interact in it is the second.  looking for contentment, i think, ought to be the end-goal of this interaction in and with the world.  i’m not suggesting i was blissfully and then bitterly arrogant for 30+ years of my life. I’m just suggesting that my time back at the tourist dive may have put some things back into synch.

Here’s another one playing on the idea of time and the manner in which its effaced. I mentioned yesterday, you might recall, that my time this past week had been eaten up by work. Sometimes our time is swept up by activities, while at other times, time languishes (or is even left languished by) our activities. But this morning, I’m being active in my relationship with time. I’m taking control and killing time, myself. Today I’m the agent of time’s destruction. Similar to my episode with the paper shredder several months ago, this morning I am the god, the monster, and the ogre to petty time. I control it. It is in my hands to do what I want, and this morning, I choose to violently murder it by doing nothing at all except read the internet and the talk about how I am willingly, and happily, letting time die, die, die. so meta.

tomorrow morning I will switch hats from creator to lecturer. I spent much of the early week dithering about and creating various handouts and notes on how to nail down that perfect thesis statement for a class i’m conducting. i dare not use the term “teaching” because this ain’t teaching. No way. Sure, I’ve got some knowledge, and I’m happy to share it. But these next two days have gotta be as informal as it can be, for the kids’ sake, and for mine. Giving introductory classes on the importance of writing solid thesis statements and topic sentences can get dull, super fast. So there won’t be teaching. There’s going to be a sharing of secrets and nothing more. I’ll tell them how to get a solid thesis not for their own sake, but for the sake of their GPA. Results. We all want results. they want results. They want As. And I just want to make it through the day in one piece and without too many yawns on their parts. So goodbye Strunk and White, Hello essay outlines, caffeine, and internets.

Get this for an itunes mix: The Show Must Go On by Pink Floyd - possibly the worst song in my collection, followed by some 1957.