Filed under: self-work, voice blog, work | Tags: books, life story, philosophizing, self-work, voice blog, work
This post is partially a reaction to my post-1098 ruminations and partly a reaction to reading just the first four pages of a book called The Renaissance Soul by Margaret Lobenstine.
It contains musings on career choice, the need for passion, my ideal life progression vis a vis jobs, a reminiscence on how my historical interests progressed and radically altered… oh, and a bunch of other stuff. Am hoping this will be useful to the people contemplating this stuff, especially GG, C, and N.
This is the positive review I talk about from The Simple Dollar. It also gives a broad overview of the contents of the book, so you can see whether it will be of interest to you or not. I trust Trent’s taste in books from a long experience of reading things he’s reviewed and generally agreeing with that he says.
Without further ado, here is the post:
The Renaissance Soul: Musings on Career and FDR 1098
A partial list of things I’ve been interested in:
animal husbandry, medieval history, homesteading, brewing, embroidery, construction work, 1960s automobiles, guns, Latin, computers, UFOs, siege technology, swords, camping, Welsh, horses, Irish dance, Hughes Aircraft airplanes, 1940s films, greyhounds, stoic philosophy, Baroque opera, Risk, bomb-making (hey! I’m an anarchist), 1950s fashion, French, poetry, Mark Rothko, farming, card games, cooking, wicca (no, was never a practitioner), James Bond, dressage, ballet, Star Wars, holistic medicine, Occitan, physics, animal rescue, mountaineering, early Byzantine clothing, 9th century Spain, the FBI, foxhunting, archery…
Average length of all-consuming interest in said things? 3 months, or thereabouts. How am I ever going to figure out a career path? Lord.
ETA: After a convo in the chat room tonight… I know exactly how I’m going to figure out a career path. I know exactly what’s been trying to hit me over the head since October, and for a long time before that. What Stef said in 1098 and I promptly forgot. That is: it’s not about me. So, not about my self-aggrandizing by becoming a whirlwind Renaissance woman. Not about me serially switching careers in a desperate bid to seek happiness and validation externally. No. No… because there’s one thing that I have a deep and abiding love for. One fixed star. One goddess in my pantheon. The only thing I have ever loved – however far I may stray from her, however obscured she may become, however much my false self fights – in the deep and abiding way that keeps passion alive even in the face of fear and pain and loneliness and derision… is the truth. Not history. Not… any of those things listed above. The bright star in the firmament is truth. Wisdom. Philosophy. And for those things I will never lose passion.
At least for this fall. Spring, they say, will be do-able. It’s better so. I need to have a lot more money in the bank before I go abroad. Will get a full-time job (an actual one) this summer as well as doing some contract stuff on the side, and hopefully parlay that into a 3/4 time job in the fall.
I’ve wanted to go back to full-time work for a while now. I just don’t feel… complete as a student. It’s embarrassing not to be working. (Even though I am working, it doesn’t feel like it!)
But wait, why is that? When I say “working” I mean like 60 hour weeks, run like hell, office politics, rats on a sinking ship, balls to the wall, hilarity in the server room after hours, go-in-on-the-weekends-because-you-want-to, exciting, frustrating, excruciating, liberating, amusing, boring… full-time work. I’m talking about… ambivalence.
Wait.
I used work as a crutch for the longest time.
In the sense of… an escape.
Work was my life, literally.
I didn’t have… anything else.
And though I say I was able to work on myself from 6pm to 8 the next morning, did I?
No… not really. I sat and watched tv. Read on the weekends. Spent the time I wasn’t at work “relaxing.”
But… if I’m not working (not doing something) I don’t get any work done either. I have to have something else to drive me. I would go completely mad if I had no job. Even with school. Even if someone would support me financially while I was a full-time student, I couldn’t STAND it!! God, that thought is so embarrassing: having someone else supporting me. I can’t imagine.
So… what’s the idea here? It’s got to be something between work-as-distraction and no-work-as-paralysis. What do I do?
Hm. Headache. In a weird place on my head.
When I work full-time the way I work, all my health problems re-appear. Migraines. Stomach ulcers. I nearly kill myself whenever I’m working full-time. But I don’t know any way else to do it.
But as I am now, I’m rotting. Like an apricot. Going softer and softer. A slow, sweet decay.
I wanted to go to France to isolate myself. In order to get more work done. Self-work, I mean. Also a lot of writing. I was thinking of getting a job there. Full-time there is 35 hours a week. A little more than half of what I consider “full time.” And they give 5 weeks of paid vacation there. Five whole weeks. To be paid to do nothing. I don’t understand. But fundamentally… no. Right now, as I am… I couldn’t make the best of it.
I need to wait till I can make the best of it.
But no… see, the problem is that I want someone else to order my life. A boss or an appointment book or something else to lend structure to my days. Since I don’t seem to be able to do it myself. Or… I resent living by an appointment book in my personal life. Why do I want to manage that resentment in my professional life?
Whatever goals, whatever to-do lists I make, I always end up not abiding by. That’s alright… except I often go completely the other way, and incur negative consequences that the to-do lists and goals and stuff were meant to have me avoid.
What happened to the golden mean? Can I ever do anything “in the middle” ? Not at either end of the pendulum swing? Of complete over-work and exhaustion, or complete indolence and failure?
Because both are failures. To run myself ragged to the point where I’m bleeding internally – literally! – or sitting on a shelf and mouldering are both… failures. Of self-regulation? No. “Regulation” is not the goal here. The goal is to recognize the third way. So that I neither need to kill myself with work or kill myself with sloth. So that neither of those are options any more.
There’s this scene in Holiday. (Yes, I might eventually shut up about that movie.) Johnny tells Linda she needs a break “from the things you’ve been doing, you know, day-in, day out.” Linda says “You mean from the things I’ve not been doing days-in, please, years-out.”
Exactly. The things I’ve not been doing days in and years out. The things I was going to go to France to think about.
Do I need to go to France to think about them? Couldn’t I start it, just as well, in America? Why wait?
Wait… this is just running. I ran from mother’s house to S&S’s house, to Austin, to Dallas, to New York, to various places along the way… to get away. I’ve been running, literally, from myself. Wait. What if I stopped running. What if I could slow down? And feel like I didn’t need to run any more? Either running to get away or running to get to a destination… whether physical or psychological? Why need to run? Why need to get there before everyone else? Why need to be better or faster or to use other people as a yardstick. Why?
Why, frankly, set myself up in the same line of anxiety management mechanism I used from 19-21? Or hell, from the first day I started working years before that. Work was a way to get away from mother. I’d leave for school at 8am, go directly to work, and then get home at 11pm. By which time, of course, mother had already left for work. (She always worked nights. Refuses to work during the day. She hates people too much, she says.)
I run myself ragged to get away. From mother, first, now… – or then – from myself.
So what I need isn’t a full-time job, though I could use the money. I have enough money in the bank to take about 5 months off from doing everything. Or hell, 9 or 10 months if I live frugally instead of spending it like water. I won’t. No, no. It’s not about the money – though I hate to spend money on anything but food and books… both of which are old addictions – but… it’s about what the money can’t buy. And it’s about wasting that time along with the money.
Fine. A job I must get. But before I get it… examine why that old temptation to spend 60 or 70 hours at the office (when I was on salary, mind you – no overtime) when 40 would have done just as nicely. Would do just as nicely.
Hm. Lots to think about. I’ve rambled myself into oblivion, I think.
Oh. Voice post cooking around in my head about perfectionism. Or abject fear of making any sort of mistake at all… which is not quite the same thing. It’s not that I reeeeeeeeally want to succeed… it’s that I’m reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally scared to fail.
Hm. There’s a thought.
Filed under: FDR, school, vie quotidienne, work | Tags: france, life story, philosophizing, put money in thy purse, school, vie quotidienne, work
It’s interesting this morning… and last night… that I’m experiencing these flood torrents of thought. I’ve read about 4 pages into The Truth Will Set You Free and I came to a realization. Now… this has been coming on for a while. This realization.
I’m actually going to present this in reverse order. The school/job thing came on first, and then the thing I’ll recount now… but I think that this makes more sense this way. Here goes:
If I say that I want something, but cannot actually imagine myself doing it or see a picture in my mind’s eye of me actually accomplishing the thing… then do I actually want it? If I say that I want to have sex with a theoretical someone (no, folks, not anyone in particular) but can’t even picture what that would look or feel like or any circumstances under which it could be possible… then do I want it? If, to put it more concretely, I want to be an academic – but cannot picture what that would look or feel like or any circumstances under which that could be possible… then do I want that?
If, to put it even more concretely, I say that I want to finish my degree at Columbia, then trundle overseas to do a MA, then trundle back to America to do a PhD – but I cannot actually imagine any of those things happening, nor what the hell I’d actually do with them after I got them… and I cannot ever imagine myself lecturing anyone on medieval history… then… what the hell am I doing that for? What the hell am I running my ass off and shoving down my distaste and “paying my dues” to accomplish? Something that I “want” but cannot see ever happening?
Stef had a point the other day when he said that academia is propped up by guns. I’ve been feeling a growing unease with that notion… but that’s not really what this is about. Not totally.
Fact is, I’ve never wanted to go to school. The first time I tried college, I was 18. I was profoundly bored. The only class I really gave a damn about was American Government (a required class) which had a droll lecturer who knew his stuff and told interesting stories about the “founding fathers.” I got an A+ in that class – since it’s the only final I actually went and took. The others… heh. I went to an SCA event the weekend before the Monday I was supposed to take the finals. It was in Oklahoma. I got up very, very early Monday morning to drive home. As I was passing by my apartment (up near Greenspoint Mall, for those of you who know Houston) on the way down 45to UofH, I made a decision to go home and sleep. A conscious decision. I told myself “I can make it to school in time to take these final exams. I shall probably do well enough if I go and take them. But I am sleepy, and wish to take a nap. Which is more important – school, or the pleasure of sleep – in this moment?”
I went home and took a nap. Thought when I woke up that I should feel horrible that I’d cheated myself out of so much money (of course I failed the classes where I did not take the finals, but still had to pay tuition) and time… but I didn’t. I’d made the right decision.
Of course, that Christmas vacation was the one where S burst into my room and dragged me naked out of bed threatening to kill me, then threw the kitchen table through the window and shoved his weeping wife and locked himself in his study for about 16 hours… and so I fled to Dallas. But I signed myself up for distance learning courses through UofH. I did the schoolwork for about… oh, all of 2 weeks. And then I stopped. I beat myself up occasionally for not doing it, but the only thing I could feel towards school was a profound boredom – which might indeed, as I read on another blog this morning, be rage spread thin.
I feel that boredom now. Classes do not excite me. I cannot feel any profound pull towards doing well in school. It spreads like a track through a grey wasteland that I have not the desire to traverse. But yet in other areas of my life, I am joyous. In my friends, in my growing self-awareness, in the intellectual pursuits I undertake of my own accord, I feel joy. The depression is not general. It is concentrated, specifically, in the area of school.
So, what to do? This time I shan’t run. I won’t be precipitate, as I should leave the door open to future endeavors in the area of academia. I cannot shut that door yet, for I do not know yet what I mean to do.
I’m going to take a decision right now, and then live with it. I shan’t do any work to bring it to fruition until I’ve lived with it for a while and am convinced of its rightness. That is, if I continue feeling the lifted spirits and enthusiasm I feel now whilst living with this decision… then I will put it into effect. Here are the decisions I am taking:
1. I shall take a 1 year academic leave from school. (This I can do without penalty.)
2. I shall obviously therefore NOT be going to Paris in the fall.
3. If accepted, I shall refuse my place in the State Department language program.
4. I shall refuse my place in the Columbia-sponsored research tour in Costa Rica.
5. I shall finish out the semester at Columbia with respectable grades, but not push myself beyond what is reasonable or comfortable.
6. I shall work on my computer certifications and get a full-time job starting immediately after the semester ends. (I know my shit, but certs tend to equal more $ in this market.)
7. I shall continue to work on my personal and psychological development.
I can see myself doing all of these things, and doing them with a glad heart. But before I file academic leave paperwork or deny my acceptance in those programs, I’ll live with the decision. My birthday is on Sunday, and I shall see what I feel then.
Hm, interesting. My neck started hurting when I said I’d wait to finalize these decisions. Yet it did not hurt when I thought of doing these things immediately. Curious.
Alright. I’ve already skipped my first class of the day. I should leave by 1:30 in order to make it to my next class (French) on time. Maybe I’ll rewrite my composition, and maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll go read Alice Miller. Before I do either of those things, I’ll have a shower. Whatever I do, though, will be right. :)
Filed under: dance class, school, vie quotidienne, work | Tags: school, work
Haven’t been posting lately as have been v tired. Have signed up for classes so that I do not get home any earlier than 6:30pm on any night of the week (except Friday) and usually get home at 8 or later. Completely my fault, of course :D Am liking, oddly enough, everything but the history course (and Art Hum, but Lynn is doing her best to make it interesting for me).
Tonight in class:
Review of 1st and 2nd reel steps
1st jig step
Four-Hand Reel
I didn’t stay for set dancing, as it was already 9:20 by the time we finished the reel.
More when I feel like posting. F has given her notice to the department admin, so I’ll be applying for her job. I won’t get it – and I don’t particularly want it – but it’s worth doing just to see.
Filed under: first principles project, school, vie quotidienne, work | Tags: dancing, FDR, first principles project, france, movies, music, orson welles, philosophizing, put money in thy purse, school, snoozers, study abroad, work, youtube
I just wanted to proclaim my undying love for Orson Welles. The 10 minutes that he’s actually on screen in The Third Man make the entire movie worth watching. Joseph Cotten isn’t half bad either.
Sending in a registration form tomorrow for classes at the Irish Arts center. I know I’m going to take classes in ceili and set dancing, but I’m not sure yet whether the third class will be an intro to solo Irish dance or a fiddle class. I think probably the latter… but I don’t have the money for an instrument right now. Will just rent, then, and see if I like it (and if I’m any good!) before actually buying a violin. The class that I really want to take (on the tinwhistle) is at a time when I can’t get to the Center. Damn!!
Finally finished registration for Columbia. 2 French courses, elementary logic, earth science, art hum, and a class on the renaissance. Woo hoo. I don’t want to take the science course, but needs must. Alas, alackaday. It shouldn’t be too terribly bad, though. What I really need to do is start getting application materials together for Paris. I’ve simply got to get into that program and get out of America for a year. Will see how long I can stay abroad. The carte de sejour should last for about a year, so if I can get a decent summer job in Paris I may well stay until the visa runs out. That’s the plan at least. If not, I can go to England or Germany or… god knows where else. Maybe apply for an overseas internship through Columbia, or to that State Department language program.
Someone I know vaguely from FDR emailed me about an interesting blog project that’s been cooked up. The idea is for a group of us to write blog entries on various aspects of certain philosophical first principles, and then combine those writings into a sort of wiki. I’m not sure exactly what the audience is for the wiki, but I’d like to use this blog to explore some aspects of first principles, so this project comes at a good time. We’ll see where it leads.
Have been working a lot at the music dept. Have over $400 racked up for next Friday’s paycheck. Can’t come at a better time. I promised myself that I would not let my savings account get below a certain level. Well, it is about $65 above that level right now, so if I don’t make enough money every month to cover rent and bills, I don’t eat. Or… don’t do something else. Don’t get to spend any money, let’s say. I hope that Ye Olde SFP gives me more work-study money.
Tired tonight. More maybe tomorrow.
And the famous cuckoo clock speech from The Third Man. Forgive the Spanish subtitles.
And a gratuitous Irish reel set from the Transatlantic Sessions:
Filed under: vie quotidienne, work | Tags: food, put money in thy purse, roommates, work
So, the phone support last night (which I am getting paid for) didn’t work, as the Treo refused to sync – which is why they got rid of it in the first place – and thus I’d have had to walk him through extracting the missing memos from his backup drive and running the Treo -> Blackberry translation. Oh hell no. So I went over there today and racked up another $50 for my time, which is good. These were new issues anyway, so it’s not like I’m bilking them out of any money. Also returned stuff to Gap to the tune of about $120. Yay. Am hoping to make this the 2nd day in a row that I don’t spend any money at all. That would be nice. I almost got a chai latte at $tarbucks, but the line was too long. Then I almost stopped at Whole Foods to replenish my tea and agave nectar stocks, but the C train came and I decided I didn’t want to wait to get home. Then I almost walked all the way to the post office with the intention of picking up something at the grocery store to supplement my dinner, but it was very cold indeed, so I popped the letter in the mailbox on the corner instead. It’s amazing how many opportunities there are to spend money. Maybe I should move to a hermitage in the Andes in order to save money. Or not.
There’s supposed to be a nor’easter blowing through later on, bringing 5 to 8 inches of snow. I checked the radar and the clouds are indeed on their way. They’re in northern Maryland, southern Pennsylvania, and southern New Jersey right now. Yay. I mean, I like snow… but I don’t need 8 inches of the stuff. Good thing I don’t have to be at the music department until whenever I want to be tomorrow. I was thinking of leaving at about 10:30 and then going to cash a check before reporting there at noon, but we’ll see what’s happening with the subways.
The person who was supposed to come look at the room today didn’t show up. That’s alright, though, since the two people who came last night were very nice. We have a first, second, and third choice lined up, and then 3 more possibles waiting in the wings. That should be alright.
Am trying to decide whether to have coconut curry chicken or chili flank steak for dinner tonight. I think I need to give the avocado one more day to ripen, so will probably choose the chicken.
The sun is setting now in beautiful shades of rosy pink, dusky purple, and light blue. I wish I could take a picture, but I don’t think it would turn out right. Alas, alackaday.
Filed under: vie quotidienne, work | Tags: Ayn Rand, department of exquisite irony, FDR, food, friends, objectivism, philosophizing, put money in thy purse, roommates, work, youtube
This song is in my head for some reason. Go ahead. Click on it. You know you want to.
Had a lovely brunch with three gentlemen from FDR. We went to a nearby restaurant – a sort of French pan-African place called Kush, which is close by. Very yummy indeed! I’m glad that they didn’t mind coming to my neighborhood, since the only other good brunch place that I know of is in Alphabet City. That’s a little too far to travel on a Saturday morning. I hope to meet them all again soon. We had a great chat about a range of topics: philosophy, FOOs, politics, the economy, history, and a little personal stuff as well. I wish I had more friends like that – that I could meet regularly for coffee with people of such erudition and good humor. So… in a way this brunch is what I’ve been working towards since I was 11: finding a philosophical home and people to share that home with. I want more! Bring me more!
Fran and I are still searching for a roommate to replace Wade. We interviewed 4 people last week, and were supposed to interview another 4 today. So far 2 haven’t shown, but two more are coming at 5 and 6. One of the girls we met last week sounds like a very good prospect indeed.Fran is hoping for someone who will pay rent and keep the place clean. I’m hoping for someone who will pay rent, keep the place clean, and doesn’t have any particularly odious political or religious convictions. You never know.
Have to call the same client I went to yesterday at 5:30. Fortunately, Christian was able to access the client’s email account and set up a mail forward for them remotely. Now I just have to talk him through syncing his Treo to his Outlook (since he’s never done it before, we have to reconfigure the Treo to not sync to Palm Desktop, as it has been) and then his Outlook to his Blackberry. Ugh. He seems to be a bit more reasonable than his wife, but I’m not particularly keen on doing this via telephone. But Chris says he’s paying me for my time, and that’s a Good Thing.
Speaking of the Prime Directive (i.e. “Put money in thy purse”), I think today will be a day when I don’t spend any money at all. Karl and Jake were kind enough to buy brunch and coffee (or in my case, tea) for AJ and me, so I didn’t spend money on that. Groceries were delivered last night, so that usual Saturday expenditure moved to Friday. So the only money that I laid out today is 1/31 of the monthly rent and utilities, which I can’t really count. And I’ll be returning some clothes to the store tonight or tomorrow (I was in desperate need of pants, so I bought some online, and am returning one pair I didn’t like and then some other things which are not quite satisfactory) so there’s a little bonus there. So I’ll make about $50 today for that phone call and return about $100 in clothes. Not bad. How I’m going to achieve the Prime Directive tomorrow, I’ve no idea. Maybe I’ll look for nickels on the sidewalk again. That’s the PD: make more than you spend, every day.
And from the Department of Exquisite Irony, here is Ayn Rand’s 1961 address to the Republican candidates for somethingorother. I agree with the person who posted the video: substitute “Islamists” for “Communists” and this message is still relevant today. But Rand failed (and the ARI is still failing) because she didn’t see that one cannot achieve freedom by political means. This address was a wasted effort – as was so much of her later work. But here she is anyway:
