Who I am? I will tell you things that seem to me necessary to know. First, I live in the United States. In an urban area. Not as urban as I'd like it to be. More suburban than urban.
Second, I am still a student. This is what might be most frustrating to me at this time in my life. I am still a student. I have been in school for many years. What do I study? Critique. Theories of power. Marx. Freud. Nietzsche. Foucault. If the author names mean nothing to you, don't function, that makes me both anxious and angered. It separates me from you in ways that are impossible to articulate here. And yet you don't have to have entered these minds, these texts, struggled with them, to know them. They will live on through me here, and you will earn them.
What do I do with my days? I read. I take notes. I eat. I plot. I stew. I inject copious amounts of serial television. I go to the doctor, to get a troubling rash looked at, to discussed excessive fatigue, worry, fever, or headaches. I fear I'm dying of some terrible illness that they are missing. And most days right after I step into the doctor's office or make my way there from the library or my office I immediately regret taking the time out of my life to see these buffoons, who know nothing, and yet bill 140 plus an hour to write me a prescription I've already gotten from the last four.
I also see a therapist. Sometimes in conversation I will refer to my therapist as an analyst. But this is a lie. She mocks my investment in Freud and Lacan and it rubs me the wrong way. I do not like the dismissive way in which she speaks about Freud or Lacan, as if I am naive to take them seriously. She writes on Kohut. (Exactly.) On narcissism, I expect. I have been seeing her for several years now since I moved to this city and put several thousand miles between my real mother and myself. I see her weekly, on Tuesday afternoons. You might see posts about her.
I also am in a serious relationship and have a dog. These things will not so much take center stage in my writing here, though the two bodies, human and dog, are constantly circling me, they are my attachments to another world that I must repress for now from my writing.
Second, I am still a student. This is what might be most frustrating to me at this time in my life. I am still a student. I have been in school for many years. What do I study? Critique. Theories of power. Marx. Freud. Nietzsche. Foucault. If the author names mean nothing to you, don't function, that makes me both anxious and angered. It separates me from you in ways that are impossible to articulate here. And yet you don't have to have entered these minds, these texts, struggled with them, to know them. They will live on through me here, and you will earn them.
What do I do with my days? I read. I take notes. I eat. I plot. I stew. I inject copious amounts of serial television. I go to the doctor, to get a troubling rash looked at, to discussed excessive fatigue, worry, fever, or headaches. I fear I'm dying of some terrible illness that they are missing. And most days right after I step into the doctor's office or make my way there from the library or my office I immediately regret taking the time out of my life to see these buffoons, who know nothing, and yet bill 140 plus an hour to write me a prescription I've already gotten from the last four.
I also see a therapist. Sometimes in conversation I will refer to my therapist as an analyst. But this is a lie. She mocks my investment in Freud and Lacan and it rubs me the wrong way. I do not like the dismissive way in which she speaks about Freud or Lacan, as if I am naive to take them seriously. She writes on Kohut. (Exactly.) On narcissism, I expect. I have been seeing her for several years now since I moved to this city and put several thousand miles between my real mother and myself. I see her weekly, on Tuesday afternoons. You might see posts about her.
I also am in a serious relationship and have a dog. These things will not so much take center stage in my writing here, though the two bodies, human and dog, are constantly circling me, they are my attachments to another world that I must repress for now from my writing.
Why write this blog? Well, for a start, I am not writing anything else. And I need to be. The question of why I am not writing (my dissertation, articles to publish, essays for online journals) when I have seemingly infinite things to say has been a subject of my therapy sessions of late. But writing, for me, is to come to terms with the conflicts of my discontent. You see, I have a perpetual, ever-present desire to leave this life, my life in the academy, my life in my books, even the critiques of American neoliberalism, for the law. In this dream for myself, I go to law school, earn a knowledge of a system that governs, get a clerkship in a prestigious city where I work among other colleagues of prestige deciding on motions, drafting opinions, conversing with judges and members of the bar. Or perhaps I go corporate shortly thereafter, I dress myself before dawn in fancy suits, rush out to the metro, to take my seat at my high powered office, fielding calls and clients and court and the good old boys all day long. I make the hard decisions, always the voice of reason and justice, gaining respect, and making big money all along to dress myself in even fancier suits, eat at the most expensive restaurants, fly first class, and drive a very expensive SUV. There, I've laid it out, the disgusting, contradictory, controlling image of my desire, as it takes shape right now. The Good Wife is a horrible lie. As is The West Wing, The Wire, and countless other shows that promise lives of intrigue, comfort, power, and drama to the everyperson.
So now we all know what is driving or derailing me from writing. The delusions of this other self that I can still revive, or birth. But the self I am now is attenuating. The self that reads, that attends meticulously to writing, especially to other's writing, that lives for conversation, for questioning, for confrontation, for energetic attachment to the world, projects that attempt the grandeur of mapping reality and don't settle for surface or the given or melancholic musings.
This space to write is hopefully a place for me to separate out this defining conflict between my discontent with the university as I found it in the search for a "career" here, my desire and dream to leave and become something perfect and powerful and respected, and my love for thinking, my need for my library, critical thought, and critical work. It is an attempt not to forget the latter in the face of leaving, and to question whether they are even compatible or reconcilable, or eternally opposed. For, in effect, one seeks to enter the order of power, and dominate, and the other seeks to stand outside of it, and to denounce it from on high. This writing is a space to lay out a plan for my life that will not only fulfill this absurd will to power in me, but being to clarity about how it can and is leading me astray. It is a pace to actually ask the hard questions of value, what is good, and what good I should pursue so that I feel not only fulfilled, but justifiably so. So I have some narrative that I believe in, even if I have my doubts about, I can come to believe in what I do again, in who I am.
And there you have an introduction of sorts. I invite comments, but please be generous. I seem strong but I am insecure in many ways still. It is far easier critique someone's life than to engage or to try to understand them, their motives, what drives them, or to persuade them of something. I'm looking for those interlocutors that might see me as an anthropologist would. Welcome those who reserve judgment first. Those who want to understand how complex set of desires and images have come to take hold of me.
So now we all know what is driving or derailing me from writing. The delusions of this other self that I can still revive, or birth. But the self I am now is attenuating. The self that reads, that attends meticulously to writing, especially to other's writing, that lives for conversation, for questioning, for confrontation, for energetic attachment to the world, projects that attempt the grandeur of mapping reality and don't settle for surface or the given or melancholic musings.
This space to write is hopefully a place for me to separate out this defining conflict between my discontent with the university as I found it in the search for a "career" here, my desire and dream to leave and become something perfect and powerful and respected, and my love for thinking, my need for my library, critical thought, and critical work. It is an attempt not to forget the latter in the face of leaving, and to question whether they are even compatible or reconcilable, or eternally opposed. For, in effect, one seeks to enter the order of power, and dominate, and the other seeks to stand outside of it, and to denounce it from on high. This writing is a space to lay out a plan for my life that will not only fulfill this absurd will to power in me, but being to clarity about how it can and is leading me astray. It is a pace to actually ask the hard questions of value, what is good, and what good I should pursue so that I feel not only fulfilled, but justifiably so. So I have some narrative that I believe in, even if I have my doubts about, I can come to believe in what I do again, in who I am.
And there you have an introduction of sorts. I invite comments, but please be generous. I seem strong but I am insecure in many ways still. It is far easier critique someone's life than to engage or to try to understand them, their motives, what drives them, or to persuade them of something. I'm looking for those interlocutors that might see me as an anthropologist would. Welcome those who reserve judgment first. Those who want to understand how complex set of desires and images have come to take hold of me.
