notes from underground

this may or may not come as a surprise to you, but I simply did not do any work this week. I last blogged on Monday, a day that was completely devoted to useless introspection and worrying about not doing any work. The maxim of the day was:

1. Write a crap thesis
2. Edit it

After blogging about it and washing some dishes, I called [GERTRUDE STEIN] and broke down, hysterically returning to "I'm a confused young child and I need my mother" mode. [GERTRUDE STEIN] is a professor with many misguided students of her own, but she was a little taken aback upon discovering that I have no "goal for the future." Oh well. We set up a meeting. I went out drinking in Nashua and saw some good live music.

On Tuesday I slept late, accosted [MARV ALBERT] and told him about my dilemma. He left me with the following:

Motivation does not cause production, production causes motivation.

Seemed like a good idea at the time. Then I had my meeting with [GERTRUDE STEIN], who assigned me a single task to be completed by the next day:

Make a list of things to do.

I made the list, divided the tasks into four categories of difficulty and time-consumption, and got ready to tell [JOSEPH STIGLITZ] that I had decided not to finish on time. He was, to say the least, not pleased. It was very awkward, I think he felt like has done all he can and failed. Of course, I'm the one who sucks, but I think deep down he knows that.

I went home, took a long scalding shower, went out drinking in Cambridge, and saw some good live music.

On Wednesday I slept late, and [GERTRUDE STEIN] stopped by my house to see my list of things to do. I showed it to her and we decided on some deadlines for things I should get done by our next meeting. She gave me some money and a foot-bath-thingy that she bought for my dead grandmother. Then I went up to Salem, dropped my vacuum cleaner off to be fixed, and went to the music store to see about my guitar. It would cost $150 to fix, a big expense considering I paid $25 for the guitar, so it's back to sandpaper and wood glue for me and my axe. The music store dude also tried to help me find a 4-track cassette deck with pitch control to slow down my interviews with, the cheapest used one was $180. I said to the dude,

I just don't have enough money to fix all of my problems in life.

When I got home I smoked a little [PLAIN OLD TOBACCO] and started rereading Notes From Underground. Let me tell you, there could not have been a worse time for me to get [PLAIN OLD TOBACCO] and read a narrative about inertia and alienation. The Underground Man said:

Oh, if I had done nothing simply from laziness! Heavens, how I should have respected myself, then. I should have respected myself because I should at least have been capable of being lazy; there would at least have been one quality, as it were, positive in me, in which I could have believed myself.

So yeah, that was depressing. On Thursday I woke up early and got a phone call from my friend [JUDY BLUME], whose anti-procrastination advice seems to have failed both of us. I went to school and picked up the readings for the conference paper, put them in my bag, and proceeded along with my time-wasting. I did some emailing, checked out some phrenology charts, and considered doing radical brain surgery on myself.

[DOSTOEVSKY HIMSELF] approached me and asked how things were going. I told him exactly how things were going... He said that in the 13 years it took him to write his dissertation, the best advice he ever got was accept his own unique writing process, as different and/or crazy as it might seem to others. He told me he has noticed that I get myself worked up so much before I even begin writing, and that certainly adds to the amount of time it takes me to produce. A lot of people think that's my 'problem' because they can just sit down and write something. He told me:

Getting overwhelmed is the first step of your process, always. But in a way, you MUST work yourself up, so don't beat yourself up over it. Recognize that you do get overwhelmed, that you will get overwhelmed, and accept it as a part of your writing process.

That was some of the most sensible advice I've gotten so far. Everyone tells me to stop 'being hard on myself,' but it seems much more useful to frame it as accepting something I do and working with myself, rather than fixing something I do (or don't do) and trying to change myself. I also tend to believe that I ought to be hard on myself, considering that myself is a person who does very little work. Anyhow, that made me feel better and gave me the energy I needed to get through the rest of the day.

I TA'ed my butt off for the hour or two left before class, sharing some sage-ish advice about the group projects, while simultaneously trying to do the reading that all the actual 'students' had finished days before. Whatever.

To make a long story short, my thesis is no closer to finished than it was two weeks ago. But I got a slew of [hopefully] good advice nuggets in my travels, I have a dozen new articles to read and a new paper to write, and I did a lot of yoga, drinking, and live-music-listening. Now I have to go make some lentil stew, lest I lose my not-writing-my-thesis momentum.