Ouch, My Head

Finished teaching last week and it left me as big finishes usually do – lost. I had gotten so used to being stressed out and unhappy that my class finished and I went on feeling stressed, but about very minor things. I finally had to realize I need to take a step back from what has been going on for the past month.

After worrying myself sick about cancer for the past six weeks I am trying to take a new direction. You can’t go through life like George Costanza when something terrible is actually happening to you. You’ll go psychotic. So I’m trying to be more zen like about it all, but there is also a pressure to move in this direction. If you get cancer you are supposed to awaken spiritually, count your blessings and become a better person. It is bullshit, but I still feel like I’m supposed to be different now. I suppose I am just lazy.

However, I am trying to move in a direction that at least says “I treated cancer” instead of “my god, I have cancer.” Probably an important distinction and it at least allows me not to panic all day long.

Now I can go back to panicking about my work. I submitted my paper to both my supervisor and his partner and they both proclaimed it wonderful. I think maybe they were just feeling bad for me. My supervisor said congratulations because apparently the first draft was so awful and he never believed it could be whipped into shape. Were they just being nice because they thought I was down? I don’t know. Anyways, my paper is off to the conference. The other papers on my panel read like economics textbooks. I am the wrong type of leftist maybe because I don’t understand a goddamn thing. But part of me also thinks that I’m not this stupid. Maybe I’m the wrong type of leftist. Anyways, I will show up again and do my little song and dance and then skulk away uncomfortably. It is my niche.

I have been at home all week recovering from the loss of my left testicle (both physically and psychologically.) I hear Lance Armstrong was given a prosthetic one (he would) but I don’t think I’ll go that route. Seems like vanity at this stage would court further disaster! 

Through the general fatigue I am trying to get through my paper for the BIG American Conference I am going to. I don’t really know if it is that big or not, but my supervisor has given me the impression that I would be well advised not to fuck up or litter my submission with careless vocabulary. How do I know what these Americans want from me? I’m bound to transgress some cultural sensitivity of the American Left and be blacklisted forever. Not that it matters because I don’t think American universities are hiring many Canadianists these days. 

In any case, paper revisions are going slow because I am generally feeling tired and sorry for myself. I wrote to the conference people and begged for another week to submit and they never replied. Maybe I am blacklisted already. 

And now I am listening to early Led Zeppelin and thinking that it sounds like music made on another planet. It is 40 years old, but it doesn’t sound old. It also doesn’t sound current – just otherworldly. Good music for matching my otherworldly mood!

Day one of the conference was a success. I gave my paper to a pitifully tiny audience. You would have thought that Derrida was in the session next door. Or maybe nobody came back from lunch. 

But the session was populated with spies planted by my supervisor. All of his close friends huddled together near the front looking grave while I flailed about onstage. None asked a question or offered much comment afterwards, but by that time I didn’t really give a fuck. I skipped the official banquet and went to see The Incredible Hulk and it was time well spent. 

Surprisingly, things are not going that badly. I hit rock bottom on Saturday and my girlfriend sat me down to figure out why I have accomplished nothing in three weeks (not counting a feeble 2,000 word introduction to my paper.) We hashed it out and the issue seems to be internet addiction combined with laziness. 

Ok, the discussion was a little deeper than that, but the long and the short of it is that I had better wake the fuck up and take control of things before my career ends up in the dump. What career? 

Since then, I have had some highs and lows but I am cobbling together a draft of my paper that may not be too awful. My girlfriend has agreed to read it before we go away for her birthday on Saturday night. 

This is risky because the biggest fights we have ever had resulted from her reading my work. I can be an insecure ass, especially when somebody suggests I don’t know what I’m talking about (I don’t.) But I prefer denial. 

One person who doesn’t prefer denial is my supervisor who tells me I suck every time I give him anything. Sometimes he does this directly, sometimes subtly. Once I wrote him a long e-mail about Nikolai Bukharin, trying to work something out and asking for his opinion. He replied, “you don’t need to worry about Bukharin.” My girlfriend said I was an idiot for asking in the first place. 

In any case, I push forward, I keep plugging. 

Also, title refers to the fact that I need Tom Petty tickets and there are none to be found. Of course, I had some in the eleventh row on the day they went on sale. But then I felt remorse about spending 300 dollars I don’t have and abstained. I’m an idiot. 

Spent the day shopping for a gift for a baby shower and driving into the country. Things that normal people like to do on their weekends. For me, they are a source of endless anxiety because not only am I not working on my conference papers, in my mind they seem to be regressing and creating even more work the longer I don’t look at them. 

Am now returned to my cocoon home office (no windows) and fretting about the fact that I’m not out enjoying my day. Why hate golfers? Why not just quit grad school! The easy solutions are right in front of your face (except when it comes to my paper. There is no solution to making it suck less.) 

It’s not the paragraphs that are difficult to get down on paper, it’s the transition sentences between them. I suppose this hints at the fact that I don’t know exactly where I’m going if I can’t seem to get from one section to the next. 

This is the type of honest thing I would like to say to my supervisor (if we ever talked.) I’d say “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. Help me.” But I think he hates weakness and would only sort of kick my carcass with the end of his boot before stepping over me. “Keep plugging!” He would say hopelessly as he walked away. 

Why is it that I am convinced that I know exactly what I’m doing until I actually sit down and write it? Then it ends up in a pile of rubble on the floor of my word document and I am left feeling hopeless. 

I can’t believe this article is due in two months. And I can’t believe I am traveling internationally to tell people what I have discovered. 

I found some mojo last night by listening to a bootleg of the Led Zeppelin reunion from last year. Sometimes I find inspiration and motivation in the least likely places.

In any case, I don’t feel so terribly blocked as I did for the past few weeks. I am trying to take advantage and drive my word count upwards. 

Cats and girlfriend are both grateful to Led Zeppelin for the transformation. Now to turn this turnaround into analytical gold…

If writing a blog about your troubles writing actually worked then all bloggers would probably be Booker winners by now. I know this isn’t the case. I have an ex-girlfriend who writes a pathetic blog about how badly she wants to be a writer and about writing exercizes (she spells it like that?) that she would like to do to stimulate her creativity. Finally she had a baby and now she can post pictures of it and write meaningfully about being a mother. Blogs are great for this. 

I’m a humanities grad student at a Canadian university. I’m entering year five and starting to panic that the work I have done in the past three years since my comprehensive exams is all shit and that I’ll be brutally humiliated when I finally go to my defense. Although, a defense is a distant dream at this point. I am currently bogged down in a draft of the first three chapters that my supervisor hated. Since reading them he has largely withdrawn all affectionate camaraderie that we built up over the years that I showed a lot of promise. Other students tell me this is in my head, but I tell them it doesn’t matter if it is. 

Right now I don’t have to write the dissertation, I just need to complete two conference papers I have stupidly agreed to deliver this summer. Both are based on the failed chapter drafts which makes revising and condensing them an absolutely brutal task. But I have been a student my entire twenties and pretty good at pulling things from the fire just in time to avoid disaster. Each crisis feels different though – they all feel like the final and most humiliating defeat is just around the corner. I’m about to be revealed for a total fraud. I knew this day was coming. 

But. To push it back by a few more months, I’ll try to get everything done in time. Meanwhile, my home life is starting to show cracks from the mental strain. Being a grad student, you feed on the little successes – like five dollar top-ups on the gas tank of your first car. At least this is how I feel. For now, just waiting for the next sighting of a gas station and keeping my eye on the “empty” line.