Procrastination Masturbation
Nothing but exhaustion this week...
I've been meaning to do several things since my return to Philadelphia, and as of yet I haven't done any of them. Sitting before me is a notepad, roughly 1/4 full of notes towards a novel. Sitting on a server in god-knows-where is a website, complete with actual weblog that remains empty (LJ != weblog, hence the masturbation). Sitting next to me is a book that contains 3 of Beckett's novels and I haven't touched Malloy in over a week. On my feet are a pair of socks with holes in them.
Before addressing each one of these matters in kind, perhaps it would first be best to address what it is that I actually have been doing.
Sleeping. Reading about photography, postcolonialism, and the British Renaissance for my graduate seminars. Wasting time on BoingBoing and YouTube. Re-evaluating my life on a daily basis (have to do something during my 90 minutes of commute on the train).
Today, I felt some tension on the train. A man was lying down across a row of seats. And upon noticing him, the woman who was taking tickets and looking at passes pointed out that he didn't have a ticket. The man then proceeds to explain that he paid "the other guy" (brief aside, the "conductors" switch trains several times a day for breaks and/or shift changes; I've frequently had to show my pass to multiple conductors during a single trip). The woman looked at the man's "ticket" and then commented that it appears to have been another person's ticket that he picked up off the floor (second aside, the "conductors" frequently throw tickets on the floor if they are left on the train). She then explained rather firmly, read: yelled, that he would either have to pay her the $7.00 it would cost for a ticket to his destination in New Jersey or get off at the next stop. She then continued down the line and the man went back to lying down. He didn't get off at the next stop, nor did the woman return to collect the money. In fact, she passed him at least three times that I was able to I count before I got off at my stop.
Me? I was hoping to see someone get kicked off the train.
Discipline problems in my class. Moreso than last semester, I keep getting hit with the realization that I'm now a figure of authority. Last night, as I was lying down myself, the last image that popped into my head before sleep was that of myself in a heavy metal shirt, sporting a nice five o'clock shadow, presumably doing dumb-ass twenty-something things. It seems like ever since I began graduate school, I've de facto opted to pass up the life of a typical twenty-something. As much as I enjoy being in school, studying at this level (because, despite the constant stress, its quite thrilling), I look out at other people my age and see them enjoying a level of freedom that I only got to taste after graduation before departing to Philadelphia. Despite living completely on my own, and doing a reasonably fine job of it, I find myself more constrained than ever by my job and my studies.
It's very hard to think of myself as both the shaggy fellow who thought it was a wasted night if I wasn't wasted and the clean-shaven guy who is up at 6am four days a week so that he can prepare himself to shape the lives of a couple dozen kids or go over his notes for a seminar.
As someone recently pointed out to me, I'm still a kid myself. And yet, I can't do what I do and think of myself as one at the same time. And it is for this reason that I am quite positive in my decision to continue forward in my plan to transfer schools after next December. It will afford me a 9 month break to just be a twenty-something kid with nothing to lose.
So essentially, this has been my life in Philadelphia for the past week and a half of so.
My plans for a new novel about disconnection in an age of extreme connectivity have been hold on due to burn-out. I come home and either sleep or devote all of my time to reading 1-2 books per seminar that I have to get through each week (so potentially, 3-6 novel length texts of either philosophy or fiction). After that I generally just vegetate to Torrented or YouTube'd videos.
Similarly, I haven't had time to read anything outside of my class readings. And certainly, this makes my plans for a literary blog hard to carry out. I don't want to write anything on the Thomas Wyatt lyrics I've been trudging through...or the Hawthorne and the Whitman...
And finally, I keep forgetting to get new socks. Going to a Walmart is absolute hell here for several reasons: a) Walmart, hello! b) every store here is two-three times as crowded on an average day as a store in Louisville would be on a busy day, c) the closest Walmart/Target/K-mart type store is 10-15 minutes away. Maybe this weekend if I can get a good chunk of this Stephen Crane read. Jesus.
I've been meaning to do several things since my return to Philadelphia, and as of yet I haven't done any of them. Sitting before me is a notepad, roughly 1/4 full of notes towards a novel. Sitting on a server in god-knows-where is a website, complete with actual weblog that remains empty (LJ != weblog, hence the masturbation). Sitting next to me is a book that contains 3 of Beckett's novels and I haven't touched Malloy in over a week. On my feet are a pair of socks with holes in them.
Before addressing each one of these matters in kind, perhaps it would first be best to address what it is that I actually have been doing.
Sleeping. Reading about photography, postcolonialism, and the British Renaissance for my graduate seminars. Wasting time on BoingBoing and YouTube. Re-evaluating my life on a daily basis (have to do something during my 90 minutes of commute on the train).
Today, I felt some tension on the train. A man was lying down across a row of seats. And upon noticing him, the woman who was taking tickets and looking at passes pointed out that he didn't have a ticket. The man then proceeds to explain that he paid "the other guy" (brief aside, the "conductors" switch trains several times a day for breaks and/or shift changes; I've frequently had to show my pass to multiple conductors during a single trip). The woman looked at the man's "ticket" and then commented that it appears to have been another person's ticket that he picked up off the floor (second aside, the "conductors" frequently throw tickets on the floor if they are left on the train). She then explained rather firmly, read: yelled, that he would either have to pay her the $7.00 it would cost for a ticket to his destination in New Jersey or get off at the next stop. She then continued down the line and the man went back to lying down. He didn't get off at the next stop, nor did the woman return to collect the money. In fact, she passed him at least three times that I was able to I count before I got off at my stop.
Me? I was hoping to see someone get kicked off the train.
Discipline problems in my class. Moreso than last semester, I keep getting hit with the realization that I'm now a figure of authority. Last night, as I was lying down myself, the last image that popped into my head before sleep was that of myself in a heavy metal shirt, sporting a nice five o'clock shadow, presumably doing dumb-ass twenty-something things. It seems like ever since I began graduate school, I've de facto opted to pass up the life of a typical twenty-something. As much as I enjoy being in school, studying at this level (because, despite the constant stress, its quite thrilling), I look out at other people my age and see them enjoying a level of freedom that I only got to taste after graduation before departing to Philadelphia. Despite living completely on my own, and doing a reasonably fine job of it, I find myself more constrained than ever by my job and my studies.
It's very hard to think of myself as both the shaggy fellow who thought it was a wasted night if I wasn't wasted and the clean-shaven guy who is up at 6am four days a week so that he can prepare himself to shape the lives of a couple dozen kids or go over his notes for a seminar.
As someone recently pointed out to me, I'm still a kid myself. And yet, I can't do what I do and think of myself as one at the same time. And it is for this reason that I am quite positive in my decision to continue forward in my plan to transfer schools after next December. It will afford me a 9 month break to just be a twenty-something kid with nothing to lose.
So essentially, this has been my life in Philadelphia for the past week and a half of so.
My plans for a new novel about disconnection in an age of extreme connectivity have been hold on due to burn-out. I come home and either sleep or devote all of my time to reading 1-2 books per seminar that I have to get through each week (so potentially, 3-6 novel length texts of either philosophy or fiction). After that I generally just vegetate to Torrented or YouTube'd videos.
Similarly, I haven't had time to read anything outside of my class readings. And certainly, this makes my plans for a literary blog hard to carry out. I don't want to write anything on the Thomas Wyatt lyrics I've been trudging through...or the Hawthorne and the Whitman...
And finally, I keep forgetting to get new socks. Going to a Walmart is absolute hell here for several reasons: a) Walmart, hello! b) every store here is two-three times as crowded on an average day as a store in Louisville would be on a busy day, c) the closest Walmart/Target/K-mart type store is 10-15 minutes away. Maybe this weekend if I can get a good chunk of this Stephen Crane read. Jesus.