Desk Jockey

I feel like I'm really done being a desk jockey. I feel like I'm done sitting in front of the computer all day forcing myself to do work that I have ABSOLUTELY NO MOTIVATION to do. I'm not really sure *why* I do it except that I don't know what else to do.

I just don't know how to admit to myself that I'm done and I have to move on.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. -Albert Einstein

When something isn't working, you change it.

I felt myself hardening. I was frustrated with a great number of things in my life and this has become very clear to me in the past few weeks. Something just wasn't right. I wasn't getting what I needed to do what I had to do. I could see those old patterns of frustration and blaming and hardness setting in.

Hardness.

My harness leads to things I like about myself: my firmly held convictions, my discipline, my strength (both physical and emotional), my biting sense of humor (i.e., making fun of things), the fact that I'm forthcoming.

My hardness leads to things I dislike about myself: my rigidity, my sometimes hurtful frankness, my impatience (both with myself and others), the fact that I'm judgmental.

I tend to cling on to things even though they're not working anymore. It takes me a while to realize that I'm doing this. But once I let go, even if the results themselves don't necessarily *change*, I can see myself responding to the world differently. It's freeing.

I'm experiencing one of those metamorphoses right now. Onward.

The Nature of Work

I hate autumn. Everyone is so happy that it has arrived. Me? I snort and sneeze and suffer through allergies, feel that initial chill in my bones that I know will only get worse and remain there for 5 more months, I'll get colds, feel cold, and re-figure out how to layer appropriately to bike to school, work, yoga, and everywhere else for that matter. I'll be less motivated and go to bed even earlier. I do not welcome fall as most everyone else does.

I think I've already hit that initial funk that haunts those with seasonal affective disorder. I'm ready to quit graduate school and wonder what the hell I was thinking devoting myself to a career that demands I sit in front of a computer for umpteen hours a day and turn reading into a task rather than a joy. I read a non-academic book yesterday. I sat down and read the entire friggin thing. It had a plot, I could easily stay focused on it. I didn't worry about whether I was "getting it" or "remembering it" or "integrating it." It was glorious. And writing. I hate it. I'm happy about the final outcome but I'm not sure being a third rate (and I'm being kind to myself when I rate myself third) writer and thinker is worth the effort.

David Rakoff (may he rest in peace) said of writing in Don't Get Too Comfortable:

During the act of making something, I experience a kind of blissful absence of the self and a loss of time. When I am done, I return to both feeling as restored as if I had been on a trip. I almost never get this feeling any other way. I once spent sixteen hours making 150 wedding invitations by hand and was not for one instance of that time tempted to eat or look at my watch. By contrast, if seated at the computer, I check my email conservatively 30,000 times a day. When I am writing, I must have a snack, call a friend, or abuse myself every ten minutes. I used to think that this was nothing more than the difference between those things we do for love and those we do for money. But that can't be the whole story. I didn't always write for a living, and even back when it was my most fondly held dream to one day be able to do so, writing was always difficult. Writing is like pulling teeth. 

From my dick.

Yes, Mr. Rakoff. That's about right. Making... ahhh!

In this essay - as alluded to in the quote - he also discusses the nature of the transformation of a task into paid work. How that changes the nature of the thing. I think he's onto something there as well. The moment I become re-enmeshed in academia, I get a sense of panic. I want out and I want out NOW. No other thing tells me to flee quite *that* much. But what else is there? Ironically, the nature of the work that I hate is to interrogate the historical and contemporary facets of our economy that demands a "profession" or at least that one become a "wage slave." The wrong-headed "value" placed on sitting at a desk for 8 hours a day doing shit that you hate and that, frankly, is killing people metaphysically as well as physically. Consider this quote by Murray Bookchin:

Socially, bourgeois exploitation and manipulation have brought everyday life to the most excruciating point of vacuity and boredom. As society has been converted into a factory and a marketplace, the very rationale of life has been reduced to production for its own sake—and consumption for its own sake.

This makes perfect sense to me. The way it's all set up. It's a fucking crock. I had a conversation with my friend J this morning about the industrious folks on the Baltimore Free Farm. I was admiring the hard work that they do as well as their deep sense of community and commitment. She wondered how on earth they "made a living." It make me think about how there's so much ideological baggage around "making a living." I explained that they traded their labor for a wage when they needed to but also relied on each other, shared with each other, limited their material desires, and produced a great deal of what they need and want on the farm itself. It blew her mind, that life can be that way. 

Outside of the Free Farm's commitment to sustainability, their value lay in the fact that they demonstrate that life can be profoundly different than that demands of wage slavery and much more enjoyable. They enliven their "species being" and engage in non-alienating work. This is not to say that they live in some type of perfect utopian harmonious la-la land devoid of human drama. But their lives and work, it seems to me from an outsider's perspective, give them a deep sense of meaning and community. 

It's so different than checking my email and FB every three seconds to feel connected to something real. 

My Authentic Self

It's no surprise to anyone who knows me: I fucking love yoga. I really do. I follow yoga blogs, I practice A LOT, and I'm generally curious about how bodies work. One of the things I'm no so into in yoga teachings, philosophy, etc. is the somewhat individualist conception of "enlightenment." There's lots of talk about uncovering the "authentic self" - that the superficial concerns of the world will melt away and the "true self," the unattached self, the observer, will arise from that and create liberation. This flies in the face of my other life as a sociologist who believes very firmly that the self is so embedded in the social; that the self, while they may have their tendencies, are inextricably linked to the broader social, cultural, environmental context that there can be no shattering and realization of authenticity. It rings hollow to me.

Instead, for me, yoga is about dealing with the world as it is. It gives me the tools to breathe through the frustration. Sometimes practicing is one of the most frustrating things I do. For instance, I've been working on dropping into a backbend from standing for YEARS and YEARS. I've (frustratingly) watched my yoga students surpass me in this very fundamental pose in Ashtanga. It's a pose that I just can't figure out. I might not ever figure it out. But I'm going to keep trying. I've learned long term patience. I've learned to be strategic. I've learned to confront my fears but all the while be pragmatic and safe - meaning that I want to do this thing for as long as I can so I need to make my interaction with it sustainable.

I take these lessons into my life. In that way, I get a lot from yoga. I use it to serve my life. What makes me suspicious is that people turn a mechanism for drawing lessons about life into life itself - giving everything over to the "spiritual" practice of yoga as if it's transcendent in and of itself. In some ways, I translate it as narcism masked as spirituality as the rhetoric claims that in the finding of the self, the world can change. I think yoga is a great way to make life more bearable in order to go out into a fucked up world and confront its realities without going completely mad. At least for me, it's done that. But I think many rigorous and transcendent outlets allow for that - playing music, dancing, singing, hiking, climbing, meditation - whatever ways people find to center themselves in the visceral.

It could be that I'm a soulless killjoy. But I am finding more and more this "authentic self" stuff gets to me. It fully confirms the individualist tendencies of Western societies - particularly as they play out in the United States - at a time where collective pursuits are more necessary than ever. While I am not suggesting that people are taking this philosophy to its most radical conclusions, complete and utter asceticism, most people don't, I worry that yoga *can* be another mechanism for putting one's head in the sand as justified through philosophical and spiritual texts. 

Maybe I'm conflating this quest for the authentic self with escape from the world. I think a sophisticated reader of these texts would argue that indeed, I am. But I'm not talking about the sophisticated reader. I'm talking about the ways in which something very complicated and nuanced turns into another marketing scheme (Lululemon cough cough) that sells (relatively affluent) people their liberation at 80 bucks a pop.

I'm glad nobody actually reads this blog. I'm sure this would be very offensive to lots of people. 

pluggin in

Super quick post before I have to take the pup out to poop.

What is it about the middle of the night? The middle of the night is when lots of folks feel the weight of reality crashing in on them. Last night, I had the 'holy fucking shit, the environment is going straight to hell and here I am in my office reading John Zerzan and acting like what I am doing is at all meaningful.'

I do not deny that my role as educator is meaningful. It's probably my most important contribution. But if money didn't matter. If weren't worried about how to buy cat food today, I would most certainly be standing on the top of a mountain in West Virginia and letting Massey Energy know that they'd have to blow me up first.* The environmental crisis is THAT REAL. It's THAT PRESSING. Seriously intense actions must happen and while mitigation is impossible at this point, adaptation is completely and utterly necessary in the most just and humane way possible. I want to be part of those efforts. I am morally compelled to act and while I feel busy and engaged, it's not *exactly* in the way I want to be.

The juxtaposition of the intact mountain compared to the one behind it strikes me.

From a piece in Orion magazine: (http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/166/)



"Near Pine Mountain, Kentucky, you’d see an unfolding series of staggered green hills quickly give way to a wide expanse of gray plateaus pocked with dark craters and huge black ponds filled with a toxic byproduct called coal slurry. The desolation stretches like a long scar up the Kentucky-Virginia line, before eating its way across southern West Virginia."

And for what? Most of what we do with this energy is useless. I'm not a primitivist. But I think when the facts are in your face, the conclusion is clear. We, in high-energy intensive economies, must vastly retool our production methods. Moreover, our priorities as a collective must change. The challenge is: epochal social change is slow but the change we need must happen, like, tomorrow (or yesterday for that matter). Institutions, as Max Weber remarked, take on the qualities of a "steel hard casing", or otherwise translated as the "iron cage." In this, he is referring to the "efficiency" and rational calculation that underscores capitalist societies. As an analytic category, he's not talking about this exact thing. That said, I think the notion is useful here because it's about crystallized logic that, when scrutinized, no longer makes sense. I think that this is a defining characteristic of our social order. We've become slaves to its logic, even at the expense of all humanity. (We must grow the economy, we must employ people in useless jobs to trade their labor for a wage so that they can prove themselves to be worthy of a meal and some health care, and so on...)

The fact that change is slow and what we need is immediate scares the ever loving mother fucking shit out of me. Okay, that's all.

*I do realize that that's naive from a social movements standpoint, but I'm making a point here.

the whole problem of molding the American mind is involved here

From Victor Lebow in the Journal of Retailing

Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives today expressed in consumptive terms. The greater the pressures upon the individual to conform to safe and accepted social standards, the more does he tend to express his aspirations and his individuality in terms of what he wears, drives, eats- his home, his car, his pattern of food serving, his hobbies.

These commodities and services must be offered to the consumer with a special urgency. We require not only “forced draft” consumption, but “expensive” consumption as well. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing pace. We need to have people eat, drink, dress, ride, live, with ever more complicated and, therefore, constantly more expensive consumption. The home power tools and the whole “do-it-yourself” movement are excellent examples of “expensive” consumption.

What becomes clear is that from the larger viewpoint of our economy, the total effect of all the advertising and promotion and selling is to create and maintain the multiplicity and intensity of wants that are the spur to the standard of living in the United States. A specific advertising and promotional campaign, for a particular product at a particular time, has no automatic guarantee of success, yet it may contribute to the general pressure by which wants are stimulated and maintained. Thus its very failure may serve to fertilize this soil, as does so much else that seems to go down the drain.

As we examine the concept of consumer loyalty, we see that the whole problem of molding the American mind is involved here.

This quote is often used to capture the mindset behind the birth of consumer society. I presented this quote in class the other day and a student asked, "When did that become the law? Can we overturn that law?" These are interesting questions. There's a big difference between the laws of the government and the tacit yet very clear "laws" of culture and the economy. Her questions strike at the heart of the complexity of social change. How do we turn around the (sinking) ship that demands we "consume, burn up, ware out, replace, and discard" things at an "ever-increasing" pace? Libertarians would argue the nobody's holding a gun to our heads and making us do these things. But culture works differently than that. It's so easy to get swept up in its currents in ways that are invisible - even when one knows better. Ipads and pods, clothing and shoes, tools and couches, closet organizers and TVs. We have lusted after and/or purchased many of these things in our "eco-, minimalist" house. 

Sad thing is, when you call slavery freedom, it begins to look like freedom. Free to buy. Free to choose a major - but no free education. Free to participate in consumer society - but not economic or political life, not unless you keep the status quo rolling. These are startling realizations for some. All of it makes me angry. We are sacrificing our very existence in the name of toxic, plastic bullshit.

the value of nothing

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, we live in a world where people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. 

Of course, these kinds of sweeping generalizations are overstatements. But still...

In the last post, I was lamenting about students and their problematic tendencies. This is the time of year, however, where I begin to get a better sense of them. This is in part because they are frantically trying to figure out what to do to improve their grade - even though it's way to late. But also, I am doing the chapters I enjoy the most, that I know the most about, so I soften and they soften. I get to know and like them in the final hour.

This will be no surprise to the 2 people who read this blog, but I think our educational system is completely bogus. I had a student come to me yesterday who cannot pay attention in any of her classes (maybe ADD, maybe internetitis) and has no everloving clue what she wants to do with her life. Her parents are funding her education and are forcing her to pursue nursing even though she has no interest in it and is not passing her first biology class. I asked the basic questions of a struggling student - "What makes you learn best?""How are your note taking skills?" "How do you study?" "What interests you?" - all met with "I don't know." She confessed that she doesn't know what she wants to do, but nursing ain't it and she doesn't know how to figure her life out. I know that these sound like "first world problems." However, *I* wouldn't want her as a nurse. Would you? 

People are funneled into college and university as a presumed next step. Many of them are bad at it and many have no interest in what they're learning. This is in part because of a broken and standardized school system. This is in part because we ask 18 year-olds to choose their life path when they don't know themselves. This is in part because university is a total holding pen for a reserve army of labor that will continue to be stupefied, pacified and saddled with debt up their patooties. Makes for a good and docile workforce, dontchathink?

The whole of the employment system is fucked. Every aspect of it. University is a corollary to it. I wonder if part of my distaste for what I'm doing lay in the fact that I simply do not recognize its validity any longer. 

I'm a teacher

I used to think that teaching was my calling. I used to walk out of the classroom thinking: "This is what I'm supposed to be doing." Getting excited that students' minds were changing, thinking through complex questions, etc. felt important and challenging. I realize I am on a stage to be evaluated just as it is my job to evaluate them. And just as students feel demoralized from a bad evaluation, I too feel frustrated when I am told that my work is sub-par. 

I know that everyone is not going to like what I have to say. I understand that 75% are there out of obligation and see this as a transaction on their future. I hate that I lose my cool with students when they act like children but expect to be treated like adults or like those who tell me, "Well why do black people get to call me a cracker but I don't get to call them a n*gger?" But there are so many aspects to this job that I am just plain sick of that I'm seriously evaluating whether or not I want to continue after I am done my PhD. Every year, grading tests and papers gets harder for me (it's so tedious). Every year, watching students fuck around on gchat, twitter and facebook while in the classroom makes me wretch and die inside a little more. Each time I see masses of people completely unmoved by and unconvinced of ongoing injustice in the world, I want to weep. Each time I hear a student complain that I don't post my lecture notes on the internet I want to strangle. Every time I'm called "opinionated" while a male colleague is called "passionate" or he "tells it like it is" I want to scream. Each year I find all of this more difficult to shake off. 

Get a Job!

I get incredibly frustrated with the common - and frankly weird - reaction to people who protest: "Get a job!" There are several assumptions that underly this reaction that upset/irritate/sadden me.

First, most people who are protesting for better life conditions - either on their own behalf or as conscious constituents - *do* have jobs. In fact, so many are overworked and struggling to engage in movement activity. Many sacrifice a lot in the name of social justice. I just want to clear that up to the random assholes who yell at protesters most of whom surely follow this blog.

Second, the assumption is that there are plenty of jobs available. This shows a profound disconnection from the realities of the job market. There's the "McDonalds is always hiring" or somesuch. I can't be sure but those who say this are likely people that are fully employed and have somewhat satisfying career tracks. They often harken not their own bootstrap experience but their parents or grandparents - "My ___________ worked 80 hours a week in order to put food on the table and care for their 3 kids. They never complained... blah blah blah."* This statement leads me to my third point.

Third, working 80 hours a week and not being around to raise your kids or have leisure time is the best we can do? Is that the only kind of society we can hope for? Underneath a lot of the rhetoric is an implicit support for a failing status quo and a PROFOUND lack of imagination. One of my all time favorite quotes is from Stephen Duncombe in his book about zines. He writes,

...the powers that be do not sustain their legitimacy by convincing people that the current system is The Answer. That fiction would be too difficult to sustain in the face of so much evidence to the contrary. What they must do, and what they have done very effectively, is convince the mass of people that there is no alternative.

I see this failure of imagination when I teach. When I pour my heart out to students when we learn Marx - that Marx was in awe of capitalist production for its tremendous productive capabilities, that these mechanisms can free us from toil rather than enslave us. For a moment, maybe 5 people get it. But "reality" sets back in, for all of us really, and we go on.

All in all, I think we can demand more. It's possible and it's not wimpy to want more time with our families, our friends, cooking *real* food, relaxing, caring for our neighbors. We don't need to exhaust ourselves making others very rich. To me, it's that simple.

*I fully realize that the idea that a career as a measure of self worth is a "first world" notion and that many people work many hours for little return. I will get to that in a moment.

I'm backish

I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted. Ordinarily, I post when I have some time to ruminate. I have some half finished and largely forgotten posts – about the Occupy Movements, about household decision-making, about animals. By the time I revisited them, the fervor that led me to write about them had diminished and there they sat.

I’m doing pretty well in Baltimore. I feel engaged. There’s no shortage of movement work, PhDing, pets, stray cats, teaching, and socializing. Most times I have to actively say no to the awesome events and leisure activities in order to take a breath.

Problem is, I’m too busy. The weird thing about doing schoolwork in Toronto was that I had time to sit with my ideas. I let the ideas breathe. Paradoxically, having that much space felt isolating and depressing. I actually enjoy the momentum but I know it's detrimental to my progress as a PhD candidate.

I've purposefully downshifted for April (at least a little). Hopefully that will allow me some space for reflection - both academically and politically. I'm currently reading a lot about the environment and I'm really concerned about the lack of political momentum in the U.S. in this regard. This is topped off with these incessant attacks on women's bodies in really fundamental ways around rights that I (sadly? stupidly?) took for granted. It makes me think about how social movements solidify gains. The state as mechanism to do so is such a tenuous entity.

While I'm happy overall, I do feel a little uneasy about the state of things writ-large.