Is guilt-free procrastination even a possibility anymore?
Walking down to the mailbox this afternoon, I paused to think about how great it is that I don't have to work on Fridays. This was a great feeling, until I remembered that I had spent the morning on the porch enjoying the sunshine (clearly not work), but also reading an essay I'll be teaching my class in a few weeks (obviously not not-work). Sometime in the past month, the line of demarcation between my life as wage-earner and my life as a human being evaporated without my noticing.
This makes me uncomfortable. Back in the old life, it was much easier to figure out what to do with my time, as the capitalist wage-labor system had conveniently commodified it: when on the clock, one must waste as much time as possible, thereby driving up the cost of each unit of work performed; when off the clock, one must enjoy one's self as much as possible, thereby extracting the maximum utility-value from each unit of time not sold to one's employer. Simple.
Now, however, work-me and recreation-me are becoming distressingly coterminous. Grad students' habit of incessantly discussing Melville or harping on dissertation committees at parties was something I attributed to either a case of social ineptitude or simple bad taste -- but no -- they're simply still at work, sort of. Every party is an office party, complete with the requisite professional networking. Remember the joke about the English major in the video store, compulsively deconstructing the blurbs on the backs of the video boxes? (You think this is ludicrous, but I was witness to a gang of these people discussing pedophilia motifs in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; the host that night was trying to teach his dog Latin.) Same thing: lack of separation between self and job.
Now all I have to do is figure out some way of keeping this from happening to me. Perhaps I'll "beep" the nose of every person that tries to talk shop off campus:
PERSON: So, are you a Brontë man or an Austen man?
ME: Beep!
PERSON: Um... I have to go now.
This makes me uncomfortable. Back in the old life, it was much easier to figure out what to do with my time, as the capitalist wage-labor system had conveniently commodified it: when on the clock, one must waste as much time as possible, thereby driving up the cost of each unit of work performed; when off the clock, one must enjoy one's self as much as possible, thereby extracting the maximum utility-value from each unit of time not sold to one's employer. Simple.
Now, however, work-me and recreation-me are becoming distressingly coterminous. Grad students' habit of incessantly discussing Melville or harping on dissertation committees at parties was something I attributed to either a case of social ineptitude or simple bad taste -- but no -- they're simply still at work, sort of. Every party is an office party, complete with the requisite professional networking. Remember the joke about the English major in the video store, compulsively deconstructing the blurbs on the backs of the video boxes? (You think this is ludicrous, but I was witness to a gang of these people discussing pedophilia motifs in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; the host that night was trying to teach his dog Latin.) Same thing: lack of separation between self and job.
Now all I have to do is figure out some way of keeping this from happening to me. Perhaps I'll "beep" the nose of every person that tries to talk shop off campus:
PERSON: So, are you a Brontë man or an Austen man?
ME: Beep!
PERSON: Um... I have to go now.