academia

This paper is killing me and I am only knee-deep mucking through the outline.

I cannot contemplate why someone would pursue any field of hyper-intellectualization, such as only like my topic: Capitalism and Happiness.  I selected the topic hoping for neat and concise excerpts that could be mushed together for a neat and concise sunday evening essay.  I was dismayed to find even in my tiny state college library an entire shelf of nonfiction on the subject.
 
I experience the aptitude for hyper-intellectualization in myself which I have taken already taken active steps to avoid, i.e., pursuing a career that is greater than 50%  feeling (beyond explanation): Music. I resent the effects of this economics paper and this piddling GE class required toward a non-related degree for pushing me into retrograde.  It is saturday night and I'm like okay should I activate the potentiality of undifferentiated brain cells or kill some them bitches.  The process of divining out any magic of something like happiness or a complicated organism like an economy is as necessary, neurotic, and valid as "The Predictive Stages of Colonialism on New Earths" or whatever the hell your graduate thesis will be.  I am isolated due to the increasing of my convolutionism toward infinity and jaded by experiences since all are reducable to timeless recurring themes

por ejemplo the thesis of my paper is that both the splendor and terror of capitalism lies in its nature of Change - as in, the prospect of moving up in the world and also the fear of getting fat when you get older.  I meant to write unemployed but this hybrid sentence exemplifies the overextension possibilities of a very uninteresting theme.  I often think how nice it would be if things did not change, because I would be free to accept things the way they are with less apprehension.  Like, my body, my habits.  Doing the same thing every day (without the paradigm that the things you are doing today are the building blocks for tomorrow) would truly be a relief, since to bear the responsibility of your future is exhausting (self-doubting and guilt-ridden).  I recognize this as the same predisposition that could make me vulnerable to joining a cult, being a drug addict, or a gypsy, but tragically I recognized the same tendencies in middle school and by then was already too strong-willingly attached to idiosyncrasy.

Another theme is inflation which is the reason for all of these things:
1. increased prices of everything directly related to the passing of time
2. words like "darn" became obsolete as expletives at the dawn of time (1905), fuck is on its way to useless (in terms of shock value)
3. You can't date nice, normal people anymore, preferring sexy and exciting lunatics
4. A bachelors degree is practically the minimum for entry-level work
5. You gotta get smarter, more muscle-y, more popular, richer, own more stuff, compared even to your own self
6. technology is smaller and increasingly impossible to fix yourself
or in summation: it is the inability of anything to hold still and be satisfied

A very good reason to pursue intellectualism and go to graduate school is to write a book and thus become a primary source so that I can quote your erroneous wisdom in my paper

When I tried to escape organizing of useless thoughts of a complex society with three colors of sharpies to act like a normal person I went into the kitchen and baked procrastination cookies with my happy, placid roommates.  I initiated a topic for debate (are male weight-lifters vain?) and exacerbated the differences between the perspectives of tracy (no, duh) and cate (yes, duh), started a healthy and angry debate and left satisfied when the storm was as torrential inside the house as outside.

accumulation

Today was a very exciting day of procrastination.  It began when I woke up at 4:30 with residual anxiety from a terrible piano performance.

(At this recital)

I wrote a terrible poem:
If you were slightly further on the autistic spectrum, I told him, you would be a lot better at piano
       I know, he said firmly, like he’d already thought about it.
Isn’t it hard to persist so averagely. Next to exceptional people you seem to fail a lot.
       I don’t know - is 4:30 am too early to get up and think about something else ?
As for myself, I don’t attach worth to scholastic success or good looks
       I know yes, but I suppose I ought to know better

I tried very hard to listen in music theory and economics but my leg was bouncing and I kept looking out the window.  I've recently learned my jaw and neck and scalp have all these muscles twisted in tight little knots, and learned the wonder of massaging these myself.  I get very involved in massaging my face and  half-heartedly wonder if it is something to not do during class.  I made a list of overlapping philosophical quandaries for both economies and college students:

1. Is acting in your self-interest the best way to guarantee  that you get what you want/need, or does it alienate individual actors from each other and bring out the worst in them? (people definitely date like capitalists - myself included, the asshole out of means of self-preservation)
2. What is success?  Money?  Material wealth?  Freedom to not work?  Popularity?
3. Can an economy/college student function consistently at less than optimal levels (say, 85% in everything) and this still be considered a healthy equilibrium?
4. If individual thought is so important to innovation and guaranteeing the freedoms of future self-expression, why does the reward of popularity drive endlessly toward group thought?
5. Must you be either a self-starter (entrepreneur), a good natured side-kick (proletariat), or partier (landlord)
6. Is it better to be a self-starter or to defer your future to institutions (college, prison) ?
7. Depression: to be avoided at all costs? (Even suppressed from mention, for fear of giving it additional psychological power?)
Or, a natural and necessary time for reflection and excision of wasteful ventures?
And, is it better to leave it to its own devices or intervene?

I have very much reading to do and many papers to write (two) and due to my inability to sit still I went into the woods to read "Happiness and Hardship" for my paper on Capitalism and Happiness.  I kept stepping in mud and sliding down hills and I thought there has got to be something I can do besides walk and read books at the same time.  I thought maybe I could actually get diagnosed with adult ADHD very easily.  Then I thought that the whole process seemed like a lot of unnecessary sitting still.


When I spilled burned butter brownie batter on the sonata I was supposed to be analyzing I realized I wasn't going to get anything done but daydreaming, so I went to yoga.  I talked to my mother and I said "what? after college I will teach yoga and gig piano and be a life drawing model.  how is that not a career?"


I tried to quit piano, ear training, and not go to ahmad jamal last night, but I couldn't get away with the first and the last.  I'm not going to tell anyone about ear training so that I can get away with it.   I used to be a lot better at weaseling out of things.

but thank God for ahmad jamal

 

When you are not in college you are in life

It is the day before thanksgiving in my large empty house. I ought to be lonely, it is the season and hour to be lonely. I'm forgiving of loneliness in other people and myself, it is no sin: it's stigmatically embarassing to be alone by circumstance and not choice, for certain persuasions of people. It's structurally guaranteed, though, especially when you interact with misaligned idiosyncratic types. A surprise gap of being alone for an entire day will sneak up the way an entire room full of people falls silent at the exact same moment. Every twelve minutes or something, I'll time at thanksgiving. other structural causes: school vacation weeks when roommates leave town; or in another case, you are an asshole at thanksgiving eve eve chicken roast and get uninvited and must spend the entire holiday composing atonal music in the music building computer lab.
        I was terribly lonely today, for two hours when I wasn't texting anybody. for two hours twice today when I wasn't texting anybody. one time I was riding my bike for two hours - the samoa/eureka/old arcata rd loop - but I managed to get in a little texting in sunny brae while riding with no hands.         
                    The second time I was in yoga for one and a half hours. the half hour after class without texting was the worst because it was getting late at night (this was three hours ago) and I was getting concerned about my diminishing opportunities to text about inane things. then madeline texted me about theory homework and quarters and my little fix switch flipped but the half hour after the class without texting, that was the worst. you see I had sent out some texting before the class and I was like yes I am going to be so happy when I come back from this class all yoga glowing to popularity on a screen. but there was nothing. there was actually a little sprint logo that said I am qualified and appropriate and overdue for an upgrade on my apps.       
                    So I was cleaning om shala (which is my job that pays in yoga) and I was in this tailspin of miserable-I-am-going-to-die-aloneness which I sometimes have in situations like these. I was going to figure out loneliness, that was my goal while mopping the floor: why is this sensation so unbearable. I was empathizing and forgiving all the lonely people and their texting, missing the unconditional, backhanded sardonicism of their childhood home.
                It's silly, of course. I see chauncey nearly every day, for hours at a time, to practice long-form conversationalism. I'm up to my ears in dinner parties, and other regulating events. chicken tortilla soup night with the literates, succeeded by roasted chicken night with the bellicose musicians, followed by take nyssa out to drinks to finnish coffee shops to the park to distract her from harsh truths I just gave her because she asked, to pleasant ice cream outings with the piano dears.
        up to my ears in texting. I couldn't have a spare moment to be lonely even if I were being not so snarky about the subject. texting politics: really, you should feel gratified that your brain is so large as to organize all of these complicated rules. that you have so many opportunities to practice your short form. to align your intention and connotation delicately and acutely within one hundred and sixty characters, with the unquestioned certainty of feedback. we're more enabled to discover The Perfect Sentence than unfortunate generations before, who had only dinner parties and philosophers conclaves

and it is explains why the fine art of sexting was beyond them.  Out of respect for our predecessors, may it never be below us. From a real-life philosophers conclave two candidates were: "When you die and everyone who knows you dies, it is like you never existed." "You can't judge a book by its last page." as The Perfect Sentence, neither stands alone sufficiently. They were show-stopping suggestions in the middle of a dinner party - I said the first one, in regard to the first/last thanksgiving on the first mars colony, which is a play I dreamt of writing in time for thanksgiving dinner to be performed. and the sentence also is the reason I dreamt of such things.   Dry and on paper, it's a useless and whimsical thing. The second Perfect Sentence Candidate from the one evening it was discussed was TK, who has no anxiety about writing the perfect sentence.  I was at a party with hyper-literates who debated motivation and implied voice while TK did not second guess himself while delivering this at precisely the right time, nor after. 
            Sometimes I send a text which has a potential reaction at the extremity of what I can expect.  I mean this text messaging situation is less frequent and delicate and I have insufficient experience.  Examples are texting your piano student, texting a shy freshman who asks you a question, texting a cool person you don't really know and the situations are: how much texting are we allowed to do before you get attached/can I not text back without you thinking I hate you and you are a worthless person (which is extremely erroneous), how much texting can I do before you get attached, and how much of your coolness can I exploit without being crazy or a bitch.  So I craft the delicate perfect text sentence and it goes out and inside is the festering impatience for validation.  after a long time I am sick to my stomach with anxiety, I have fucked up and said the wrong thing again, I feel it in my gut. you are a horrible excuse of a person.  Then I am like Nyssa your stomach is sore from Yoga.  and you never overreact about anything.
             anyway I remember real loneliness, the kind that hits you before you learn to apply chemicals (endorphins, dopamine, carbohydrates, caffeine, omega 3s) in the most productive way to induce stability of brain. Before I got strong back muscles from yoga which have made me stand up straight and fooled everyone into thinking that I'm confident and their reaction fooled me.  when the things I was very attached to actively prevented me from getting close to anyone or thing so that I was miserable and it was entirely my own fault.  and I forgive and misapply and correctly and incorrectly feel guilty for about everything that seems lonely or possibly isn't. and relish in the crux of time and space where I am a vain little social butterfly with valid opinions since it seems a fugacious phenomenon.  it is really only texting a lot anyway but I plan to keep up my practice in long-form conversationalism.

last night on the swing set chauncey and I discussed artistic intent: I said I have to make people feel better about being who they are and he said I want to help people not worry about the little things which was pretty adorable

big idea

            Without any problems, we were running out of ways to spend the day.  We’re opposed to commercialism on principle, perhaps because we are cheap, so recreational shopping is out.  Mostly I spend my money on food but I’m saturated with fresh things from the farmers market nagging me about wilting.  And we’ve already had breakfast, and lunch when there was nothing to do next, so buying more now would be no short of a sin.  (We are also objectively opposed to gluttony.)  I used to be a painter – everyone was impressed – you just learned how to do that? And yeah, it was pretty spectacular in its fumbling quaintness.  But it never progressed and I went to too many art galleries and watched too many life drawing classes naked from the middle to remain convinced for long that quaint little art was anything rare to come by.  I was a writer for a long time since I only did it in little bits at a time but that too chipped away reading Gertrude Stein in little bits at a time.  She’s written everything already, her and others, and furthermore reading them is all I’ve got to do to learn the past, present, and future of anyone including myself finally answering the question what happens to girls like me with their personalities fractalizing in on themselves.  The future of others is the easy to imagine since they are concepts, but I am myself so more enigmatic.  Those books practically made the whole process of living redundant, being all that’s left is to do it, so reading was out too.

            Can’t you do art for the sake of doing it said my boyfriend, write to learn about yourself, for amusement.  Sure I could I told him but don’t you think that is a little self-indulgent in times like these after all.  Maybe you are right, he said.  He likes to read nonfiction books to amass large amounts of knowledge but he feels guilty for doing it a little bit, because he is not a reference librarian, just a pianist.

            We might give ourselves to a higher power but don’t believe in one.  We do not believe in the inherent good of humanity.  Definitely not and definitely not as an operating principle of classical capitalism since people acting in their own rationalized self-interest do things like eat a dozen doughnuts and what good is laissez-faire then, the hand putting the stint in your aorta looks pretty visible to me.  God we were awfully bitter in those days with no particular reason, subsisting down there in the labor class. Outrageously outraged.  Against ugly people especially (who we could abide until they did something wrong, like show up late for a lecture, or eat a candy bar with a crinkly wrapper, then god help them). We bemoaned how specialization creates interdependence/neediness and class conflict, and how higher education was otherwise a liability – we do not believe we are terribly interesting.

            I was the first one to suggest a lobotomy.  Look how stifling metalife is I said.  Hold on he said I am too cold to have this conversation.  Let me grab a cardigan and check facebook.  Okay I said.  While he was gone I practiced mindfulness and one-pointedness of mind.  Okay he said I just thought about it and I think I should go first.  Not both of us?  I said and he said, what if something goes wrong? At least you have read a memoir about it, I have only seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest and I don’t want to be the one taking care of a drooling dunderhead.  You can get me a job scraping lunch trays and then it’s your turn, and we will take care of each other.  Okay I say, sounds like the procedure for the afternoon.