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.