(Excerpted from something I wrote for myself this morning. I feel a little bit like Charlie Brown complaining to Linus about feeling disconnected from Christmas...)
I want to be guided by something that Charles Schulz said in a clip from that old Lee Mendelson documentary: namely, that when he has a good idea for a strip, there’s no place he’d rather be than at his drawing table. Lately, it seems that I’m just the opposite, that even when I find I have something that’s good, I’d rather be doing something else—sleeping, eating, watching tv, drinking, etc. Not that these are bad, but I fear that I’m running the risk of confusing indulging my laziness and procrastination in the name of being kind to myself—but this isn’t really kindness at all, drinking a huge beer and falling asleep on the futon at 8:00 at night to It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, a show I don’t even like. And that’s to say nothing of the emotional entanglements I’ve let myself get into this semester. There’s always something or someone I can blame for holding me back. Some of these things are legitimate cases of my needing to take time for me. But as I’m about to celebrate a year in this apartment, a year that included a prestigious conference and two forthcoming publications, not to mention the passing of my orals—I need to keep going at that pace. Just now I put the timer on pause and went to look at my course enrollment for my spring classes, which of course turned into a huge time suck, checking my email addresses, looking at an email that Brian sent me this morning—it’s these kinds of places where my time goes, these kinds of abysses from which I need to rescue my productivity. There’s no reason, when I’m only teaching one class and don’t have any coursework obligations, that I should be so constantly tired and putting things off until the next day, the afternoon, the evening, the weekend. This weekend coming up, of course, I have a huge mountain of teaching work to do. Seven papers to grade (though that is almost laughably nothing, isn’t it? It was just last year that I would be home grading 20 essays that were much less interesting than this. But I also have to figure out how to teach them Derrida, most likely during a teaching observation. I’m not worried about this, but I wish that I could be more excited. Or not even that. I’m excited in the abstract because it’s such a crazy thing to do and I think I can do it. It’s these kinds of things that I end up thinking about on my cushion a lot—and teaching in general—I still haven’t figured out why. But that doesn’t translate into greater productivity when I’m sitting in front of the computer, whether it’s at home, school, or work. I don’t do well practicing my tasks in the present. It’s so easy to deflect and take detours, searching for inspiration I tell myself but really just practicing avoidance. And it’s funny because I don’t come off like that to other people—everyone else seems to think I’m fine—but I don’t feel fine—I don’t feel excited.
I guess in my ideal world, I’m so excited about the ideas I’m working with in my dissertation and the writing of the dissertation itself that I remain focused on my teaching work simply so I can get through it and get back to the writing. Or I’m sufficiently invested in my teaching to give it the time it needs-—joyously. The problem right now is basically that I’m giving things a lot of time, but mostly in the form of procrastination. It takes me an hour to grade a paper because I suddenly look at a paragraph and realize I need to read the last 20 posts on Gawker. And it’s almost worse having fewer papers to work on—it’s so easy to get lazy—-it shouldn’t take me as long to grade seven or eight papers as it took me to grade 20 and yet somehow it does or at least gets close and I – okay I just did it again, this time with a long detour through someone else’s Facebook album. What the hell is wrong with me?
The funny thing is that I don’t want this to be a journal of just whatever—I intend this as a project journal, one where I set aside an hour a week to chart my progress on the dissertation. Not much else. Except that perhaps I need to get some of the emotional and mental background out here—possibly so I can let go of it, or get to the root of it. (That’s a good metaphor—I’m clearly not pulling these weeds out by the roots since they keep coming back.) I mean, it’s not like I can’t write for this hour and then go check the enrollment for my spring classes—why am I actually willing to stop the clock and procrastinate?
I know that some of this is the state of being a little bit between projects, with no imminent deadlines looming. One of the next big things to address will be fellowship application season. For a number of reasons, I’m going to have to pretty substantially revise my prospectus so it first the institution's guidelines, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to do that before I get the prospectus approved by the department. And it would be nice to work out the theoretical background in more detail as well, if only so I can articulate it as clearly as possible in the proposal. (Went off the clock again just now to put moisturizer on my face. This is turning into a long hour and I’m only about halfway through, based on the timer.) The proposal for the fellowship is going to have to be a lot shorter and more concise—it will also need to speak to nonliterary people. This may be something I decide to work on when I’m in St Louis for Thanksgiving and can show it to my mom. The other big thing about the proposal is that applying for these fellowships means that I’m basically proving I can / promising to finish by Spring – Summer 2010. I think that’s doable, but it means I can’t have any more wasted semesters. Not that this one has been, but it’s not been as productive as I’d like. This is somewhat complicated by the fact that I’ll be teaching two classes in the spring, but that part at least means money and I do think my life will become a bit more open to my work if I don’t have to worry about money as much. Very Virginia Woolf of me.
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