Assessment

My mother got a new iPad. Why does my mom always get the cool new tech? She never really learns to use it. She learns how to do a limited number of things on any gadget she buys, and then that's all she uses it for. It isn't that there's anything wrong with doing that, it just seems like an expensive hobby for someone who seems to have no interest in technology. She usually leaves it sitting there until I get a chance to come by, figure it out, and then show her how it's done.

Oh, crap! I just realized! She does it so I'll come over and hang out with her! What kind of a piece-of-crap son neglects his mother to the point that she buys $600.00 pieces of tech just to entice him over to have a cup of coffee and play with the thing? I need to think about this some more. Maybe I'm selling her short. Maybe she really is into the tech. I need to think about this some more.

Take-aways from my MA experience:

1. My scholarship would be much easier if I could "get organized."
2. After 42 years inside this head, I can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that I am unlikely ever to get organized.
3. "Get organized" is really just a euphemism for "stop procrastinating."
4. Procrastination is caused by dread.
5. Dread is a form of fear.
6. Woah, this almost turned into the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear.

What am I afraid of? Once I start working, the work (usually) turns out be satisfying to some degree.  I liken this to bowling:

I never want to go bowling. When people ask me to go bowling, I usually try to get out of it. But occasionally I can't think of a graceful way to bow out, and so I end up going. Every time I have ever gone bowling I have had a fantastic time. So, why do I always think I don't like to go bowling? I don't make sense.

Work is the same. I avoid it. I put it off. But once I get started I usually enjoy it at least as much as washing the dishes or whatever I was doing to try to avoid working. Sometimes I even really like the work; and when that happens, I'm generally sorry I put it off because now I have to give it short shrift because of time constraints.

Anyway, that was one take-away from my first two years of MA work. The second is related to the first; it's something I've learned but have so far failed to gainfully process: I generally work much harder than necessary on most things I do. I could do work that was just as good in half the time, and probably with less work, if I'd just keep my head in it. I get obsessive and end up ferreting around and reading a bunch of stuff, stuff I don't need to read, just because it's interesting. More dangerous, though, is the frustrating fact that any project I do generally expands to fill whatever time I allot for it. It drives me crazy. If I have a one-page reader response to do of a twelve-line poem, and I start it a month before it's due, am I being proactive? Am I getting ahead? NO! It just means it's going to take me a frelling month to do that damn reader response! I could do it just as well if I started it the night before it's due . . . maybe better because I wouldn't spend thirty days rethinking, re-reading the poem, Googling it, and second-guessing myself. Shesh! What a dork!

O.K. That may be a slight exaggeration. This is important, though, because I have a feeling that, while working too hard served me well enough in my MA (though it impacted my extra-academic life more than I liked), I have a feeling that doing so for my PhD will just wear me out.

I have a feeling that my success as a PhD candidate will turn largely on how well I manage to get this crap under control.

Also, I need a hobby. Dr. Marsden told me that last night, and I think he's right. I'm on it!

Thanks for a great two years, Dr. Marsden.

Transcendental Friendship

This morning, shortly after I awoke, I rose, opened the French doors in our bedroom to let in light and fresh air, and came back to bed with my laptop and my Chaucer to start the day with a little light work. It was a beautiful morning, sunny and cool with a light breeze. Before I could open the book and find my place in the Pardoner's Tale, there were two black forms looking out the door.

We have cats—sisters—and two of them are black with green eyes, almost perfectly matched in size, color, and shape. One must know what to look for to tell them apart, and even then a fairly close examination is necessary. They sat side-by-side, like two soot-blackened fireplace dogs, staring through the screen door. To my eyes they didn't interact with one another at all. Each was engaged in her own observation of the morning activity outside. Occasionally, however, their languid, independent leaning and head bobbing would become rapid and perfectly synchronized whole-body choreography, as if they were a pair of well-timed animatronics in a Disney ride. It didn't take much inferential skill to determine the cause of this. This coordination was occasioned by the flight of birds and butterflies across their field of observation.

I called my wife's attention to this little demonstration of sisterly accord and she propped herself up on her pillow and watched them with a smile. I continued to work on my reading, dreading the long day of grading that awaited me, especially in light of the two final papers I needed to begin for my own coursework. She, I knew, was thinking about the shopping she was planning to do this morning. Shortly, I finished the Pardoner's Prologue and, rather than begin the tale proper, I silently decided it was time to get up and get moving. As I leaned forward and placed my left foot on the floor, Laura performed the exact same movement, but with her right foot touching the floor at the same time, a rapid and perfectly synchronized whole-body choreography, as if we were a pair of well-timed animatronics in a Disney ride.

In Ktaadn, if the mountain had offered him a clear, cloudless vista how might his perception of his welcome have changed?

Lord of the Realm

Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.

—Walden

The Merlin

It was the most ethereal flight I had ever witnessed. It did not simply flutter like a butterfly, nor soar like the larger hawks, but it sported with proud reliance in the fields of air; mounting again and again with its strange chuckle, it repeated its free and beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite, and then recovering from its lofty tumbling, as if it had never set its foot on terra firma. It appeared to have no companion in the universe—sporting there alone—and to need none but the morning and the ether with which it played.

 — Walden

Blasphemy!

I'm officially sick of the founding fathers!

We conjure these glazed colossi with their antique words to condemn or defend whatever pleases us. Their words are easy to manipulate because they were composed in another time, in response to other realities than ours. These men's intentions were their own and they held them in a context far different from ours. How they might have reacted to the realities of 2010 we can't be sure.

It's useful to look back and learn from the wisdom of those who came before us and to see how they grappled with the problems of their day. Teasing intentions out from the tangled and inconsistent output of a life well and richly lived in the distant past is a fascinating academic exercise, but we shouldn't make the mistake of believing that it reveals anything about what course we should take nearly two hundred years later. Even if we could know what Thomas Jefferson or James Maddison or any of them intended, why should we care? We don't live today to serve their intentions. They lived their lives in the most exceptional manner available to them, and they achieved something remarkable. They're done. It's our job to carry on, and what The Founding Fathers intended is precisely as important as how they preferred to lace their boots.

I love to talk about these guys; I really do. Many of them were gifted writers with fascinating insights. But their remarkable words become non-sequiturs when we try to bash each other over the head with them in service of whatever current event has our dander up at the moment.

Thank you, Emerson!

Who decided that dandelions were weeds and daffodils were flowers?

A friend on Facebook asked this question. As a child I liked dandelions best, and I still love them. Cynically, I suspect that our preference has to do with control. Dandelions will grow and persist all on their own with no help from us (quite the opposite, in fact: they do just fine even if we work tirelessly to eradicate them). They are the essence of spring, really--wild and bright and joyous and unstoppable. They need only themselves.

Daffodils, on the other hand, while not exactly delicate, need us. At least they benefit from our ministrations and submit to our tender control. Daffodils do what they're told. If I plant daffies in my garden, they stay (more or less) in my garden. They bow their sunny heads to my seigneurial power.

The dandelion grows about me unbidden. It doesn't give a crap about my will. If I enjoy it, that's wonderful! If I try to control it, it puckers up and spits fluff on me.