10/12/10 - 9:05 pm
So I am blogging in a word document. I am trying to look at my essay that I’m working on. “Art and Intellectual Insurgency.” “Zen and the Aesthetics of Existence.” These are some vague working titles I have in my mind. But the honest to god truth is that I feel too tired. I feel very tired these days. Working 9-6 mon-friday is hard. It takes up so much time.
I don’t know if I want to work ‘the double shift’ and do my own work at night. I think I will eventually. But right now I’m a bit too tired and a bit too occupied by being in my own new space. Because part of it is that I am now living in my own apartment. I’m experiencing the freedom of being able to go out and eat and hang out with people whenever I want. But who knows. I just feel torn between all sorts of directions in my life.
I feel a bit torn about my next reading project. I’m pretty sure that I’m going to read Slavjo Zizek’s Violence. It just seems like a pretty perfect example of the things that I want to talk about. I have written a good bit about violence. And I have also been doing a fair amount of watching of Zizek online. I like to watch videos of him. He has amazing things to say. And the way that he says them is perhaps one of the best things. He has such excitement, such drama in his voice. So much conviction. He makes jokes, he says outrageous things, he subverts in subtle ways. I just find him pretty fascinating at the brief glances I have had.
Whoo, so tired. I’m also thinking about reading a novel. In Straw Dogs John Gray discussed a novel called Utz and I own it now. I’m looking at it right now and want to read it. It is about a guy who lived in Czechoslovakia during World War II and how throughout the entire war he just expanded his porcelain collection. He loves collecting porcelain. It doesn’t matter to him that all these terrible things are happening around him. He just keeps collecting his porcelain.
Perhaps it will give me a bit of perspective on the way that I am living my life right now. I just stock bottled water everyday. I stoke Coca-Cola for people to buy. I make 20 oz mochas with extra chocolate and whipped cream. I just feel out of touch. Not because I know what it is to be in touch and I somehow need to get back in touch. I feel out of touch because I don’t even know what it means to be in touch. It is just unclear to me what is happening at anytime and anyplace. Where does all this bottled water come from and how did everyone become so comfortable just buying it all the time? We love coffee and milk and pastries. We love America.
I also have been contemplating my own writing a lot since yesterday. My friend told me that I was a strong analytical writer but perhaps hadn’t found my voice yet. It is true in many ways. I am still learning so much and have so very much left to learn. But my voice is in the background of it all. I think that my voice is an invisble web that is tying all these different ideas together. I think that my voice echos in my analyses. I can hear my voice. Or rather I can feel my voice. I feel it bubbling in the background. It has clear statements of its own to make. But I can’t produce them yet.
I drew my friends attention to my post in July titled ‘In Defense of Thinking a Lot’. Then I reread it and I was really pleased with what I had written. I didn’t cite anyone, and I just put it all out there what I was all about, what I love to think about.
I finished Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind at work today. Great book. Excited to finish it. Who knows what is going on.
My voice. That is what is going on.
I am struggling to write this analysis of life as art, the art of life. I just always feel so far in over my head when I look at my outlines. This was true for all my big essays. For Society’s Implicit War, for The Everyday A Priori Imagination. All of those things freaked me out and felt impossible. And then I wrote them. I know I’ll write this one too. Just need to do it.
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