But such righteousness in me is not a nice thing to display and who am I for chrissakes anyway

[raybear]

I just had one of those academic moments where you discover a new source that potentially changes the whole thesis you've written in a paper. It got critical for a second, so much so that I wanted to call up my old grad school advisors who read the original piece I wrote a couple years ago (and still hope to tweak and get published somewhere) and yell at them "why didn't you mention this well-known Faulkner story to me that so obviously relates?!?!" but then I calmed down and read a bit of it and realized it wasn't as big of a deal as I initially thought, and adding this new info won't detract from the larger message in my paper.

Then I weirdly felt pleased to have such a crisis. Not because it really is so important, but because its nice to feel like maybe there's a career destiny for yourself after all.

I need more boosts like this now, my months of unemployment are starting to have a creeping, unpleasant effect on my psyche. The repetition and rigidity of schedule and obligation can certainly be a burden, but it is also a framework to live under that can help absorb some of the rocky moments of life. This year has brought me giant waves of grief and losses, many of them just the natural result of big changes, others of the traditional brokenhearted variety, and today I was wishing so badly for a mindless office job to punch in and escape from myself.

But in the end, it was still far superior to instead take a long heavy nap for two hours, then wake up and shower to go have a coffee with a friend. I guess it is worth it to endure those moments of unbearable boredom and despair that come with too much time in the same rooms, it might even be a more direct path to sit through it, rather than indirect prolonging of the emotions I'm precisely trying to relinquish. I'm not entirely ready to commit to cheerful platitudes, as my language certainly indicates, but that doesn't necessarily remove the truth part either.

Comments

[anjiyama.livejournal.com]

I would like to see another movie if you feel like making one.

I would like to read your paper. I like Faulkner quite a bit.

I pulled a tarot card last night - it did not address my question but instead suggested feeling whatever I was feeling and moving on. It was the better harder answer.

[raybear.livejournal.com]

My paper is not about Faulkner, its about long sentences -- intentional run-ons of contemporary fiction v. 19th century tendencies towards longer and more vigorous punctuating prose, the slow changed in grammar over the decades and sentence length, the effect of journalism, the reasons why Hemingway got short, etc. I was flipping through a Faulkner reader last night and read the editor's introduction to The Bear and he claims that the 4th section of this story contains one of the longest sentences in fiction, second to Molly Bloom's soliloquoy in Ulysses (which is mentioned in my paper), and that's what induced my freakout, but after looking at the story, I would argue that simply not using a period is not the same as "a long sentence", at least not for my particular thesis. But! Its an interesting add-on to my paper as another example and source, and luckily nothing as dire as I feared.

I have a few projects I'd like to work on -- including getting a website up and running that has links to my clips, I might start blogging there more, etc. And a movie is a good idea. I have so much raw footage from my atlanta trip, but I'm not ready to do that yet, so of course my brain than says "well, no movie-making for you until you do your homework!" and that's just silly, I am allowed to be a diliettante sometimes, its called brainstorming and trying. But you know, perfectionism and all that.

Funny you mention tarot, because I had coffee with a friend yesterday and she brought up tarot readings and I thought "I need to do one" but then of course came home and forgot/avoided. Then you mentioned and I'm like, ok, universe, I get it, I'll pull the cards out.