A Low Point

My internal monologue/dialogue/decalogue over the past few days has gone something like this:

Me1: Time to get started on that third essay. Next up: my relationship to academic feminism, real-life differences between men and women, Dr. Seuss, you know, all that stuff.

Me2: That's not an essay. That's a book.

Me1: Aaaagh! You're right. That's the same thing I was doing with the first essay. It was too ambitious, and that's why it's not done.

Me2: And you'll never finish it. All that time you spent, wasted.

Me1: We can't make the same mistake again!

Me3: I know what, let's pick something more manageable, like how I quit teaching composition because I really wanted to teach people how to compose themselves.

Me1, Me2, Me3: Yes, yes, that's it, we'll do the essay on composition. Let's start with a freewrite.

Freewriting Me (excerpts): I've never gotten over the irony of being given a job teaching composition. I have no native skill with composition, unless maybe we're talking flower arranging.

So there I was in this ridiculous position of giving my students advice about the process of writing, and it was all a mystery to me. “Write an outline,” I'd tell them, but I myself never wrote outlines – or, when I did, I'd find that they were useless after a paragraph or two.

I didn't know what I was doing, but I knew how to fake it, and it seemed like teaching them to fake it was better than leaving them in their ignorance.

This is boring. It was boring then, and it's boring now. What is it I really want to say? It's something about being a fraud. Showing people how to do something you yourself don't believe in. Like being (I imagine) a preacher who rails against the sins you yourself are committing. Do as I say not as I do. There was an element of hypocrisy in it. And there was also the laughable matter of being an authority by virtue of... what? My product.

But then I was supposed to teach process. And I knew nothing about it.

Really, I hate process. I certainly did then, anyway.

Why was it I thought I wanted to write about this anyway? Maybe I don't care.

What makes a topic compelling? There has to be something there, something emotional. You have to have something at stake.

I'm not sure I want to do this essay at all. Maybe it's about explaining why I quit, tossed all those years of study down the drain. Terrifying: being right at the expense of having been wrong. Like gambling: you can just keep throwing money at it hoping you'll recoup your losses. It's already too late to quit while you're ahead.

My son, thinking about going to college, and I'm not sure there's any point. Why should he go to college? To learn what?

It is really weird doing all this editing for these immigrants and first generation college students who have so much faith in education, in developmental outcomes and academic success being one and the same. And I am not sure going to college is going to help my son. I am not opposed to his going, if that's what he wants to do, but it isn't a huge wish I have for him. And why not? Because it is a huge expense, and possibly a waste. I mean, if he doesn't know what he wants to do with it. Cogs in the machine...and the machine is almost kaputt.

Watching that video of the cop who pepper-sprayed the non-violent protesters at UC Davis, I was struck by the top comment on the YouTube channel, which went something like, “Leftist privileged college students, you know nothing about what it's like to work a low-paying job your whole life; if you want to make change, stop protesting, get your degree, make a lot of money, and give to the less fortunate.” But that is not a system that works any longer. There isn't money going to come at someone because they have a degree. They're just in debt, and what do they have to offer that someone else doesn't?

Trying to figure out marketable skills. Play the system. Get the right number in the lottery.

There are no jobs in the former sense of the term. We have to make up a reason for existing. We have to compose ourselves. No one is going to give us a prompt.

Me2: Great, just great. You still don't know what you're writing your essay on.

Me4: Who cares about stupid essays, anyway? Our educational system is toast, the economy sucks, and the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

Me1: This isn't helping us get anything done, and not getting anything done is just going to make us feel worse. So let's DO something.

Me3: Listen, maybe an essay on composition is not the thing. We keep coming back to Denmark; maybe we should just start with Denmark and see where we get to.

Me2: That is a dumb idea.

Me3: No, no, it could be good: maybe it is partly a political essay, about European socialism – remember when you got strep throat and you actually saw the doctor within an hour of calling the clinic? – and partly about being at loose ends, not sure where you were going next, and you can use the essay to work through all these confusing feelings you are having NOW. Like Denmark One, the real Denmark, and Denmark Two, the metaphorical Denmark you're in now.

Me4: It sucked then and it sucks now.

Me1: Maybe we need Happy Lights? Maybe this is Seasonal Affective Disorder talking?

Me5: Wow, a lot of resistance. Maybe I just need to write something. Eventually, I'll get into it, and then I'll feel better.

Me4: Yeah, you'll get all manic about your writing again, because maybe what you're really resisting is taking a good hard look at how pointless your entire life is. Writing is just a smokescreen.

Me2: Brilliant. You were a fraud when you taught composition, and you're going to be a fraud as a therapist, too.

Me3: Maybe we can write a blog entry about this: that'll give the negative stuff a place to go, and it will limber up the writing muscles, and then we'll see what we might want to write an essay on.

Me1: No – let's do something actually productive, like some editing. At least we'll get paid for that.