work | The Practical Dilettante

Peaceful Practice

Posted on April 15, 2013 by Seonaid

This was originally posted on The Peaceful Professional, another blog of mine which has apparently suffered catastrophic failure due to neglect. That is to say, I can’t find it any more, having made some errors in setting it up that I haven’t been able to repair. It is dead (for now), but the writing lives on. Go, writing.

A couple of years ago, in a moment of frustration/inspiration, I grabbed a permanent marker and wrote on the wall in my sunroom. “Life is Practice,” I reminded myself. I was in the middle of parenting, writing, partnering, thinking about the meaning of it all, and trying to make time for practice in the midst of the chaos. It was around the same time that I placed the shelf with the children’s toys on it directly below my own shelf of sacred objects (among them a statue of the Buddha, a bowl for alms, a carving of the triple goddess, and a Galilean thermometer.)

But as true as this was, it didn’t negate the need for time on the mat, on the cushion, and alone with my thoughts. The practice of daily life is to apply the practice of… well. Practice. It’s like daily life is the performance, and the time for intentional Practice is the warm up, the rehearsal. The scales, if you will allow me to continue my musical metaphor.

“My life is not busy, it is full.” A new friend reminded me of this the other day. It echoes the words of another friend/teacher of mine, who said when I commented on her heavy bags at the farmer’s market, “No, not burdened. Laden.”

This is the fruit of Practice. The mind leaps to new places, develops new tracks, new default ways of framing experience. We are able to think different things, having confronted, relaxed with, and integrated the things we thought before. In my case, Practice leans heavily on Buddhist meditation and yoga… although I’m exploring the subtleties of those. I’m starting to realize that they may not be strictly compatible in terms of foundational assumptions about the world. Nevertheless, they provide useful ways of working with the mind. “Skillful means,” in the words of the Buddhists.

This is an approach that works with my engineering/scientific training. On the one hand, I am very interested in how things work… but on the other, I am equally contented to explore whether they work, whether we understand the mechanism or not. I understand that I may therefore be doing things that are not necessary. Perhaps someday we will be able to trim this all to the bare essentials. I am down to following the breath while sitting on a comfortable cushion on the floor, though, so there isn’t a lot more to trim down. Not in the ritual, at least. Notice the thought, label it thinking, come back to the breath. Such simple instructions, such a difficult thing to do. Some days my labelling sounds like this: “Thinking, thinking, thinking, th, thi, th…”

But somehow, it translates into a calmer mind. I find myself in the midst of frustration spontaneously labelling: “Thinking,” I think, and sometimes the quiet comes. Sometimes only for a moment, but sometimes… sometimes it just works. It didn’t used to work.

The goal… it is not to stop thinking. So many people I love tell me, “Oh, I can never meditate. My mind just runs on and on and on…”

“Of course,” I want to say, (but I am their friend, not their teacher.) “That is what minds do. And then they catch themselves. And come back to the breath.” Dearhearts, that is why it is called practice. Not performance. Not perfection. Just… Practice.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: buddhism, good-enough, meditation, peace, practice, work | 3 Comments »

Losing My Head

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Seonaid

I don’t know about where you are, but around here we have a saying, “She’d lose her head if it weren’t attached.” It is (I fear) applied to people like me, those of us who are wont to put things down where we are standing and then wander around for half an hour saying, “Where’d I put that cup of coffee?” (Ans: look in the microwave.)

But at least I was pretty confident about my head.

Until I was at yoga practice one morning, doing a simple side bend, and the teacher came along and put his hand on the side of my face to straighten up my head. There it was, off at some random angle, probably twisted forward as well, being used as a counter-balance, or whatever habitual thing I do with it.

That afternoon, we were concentrating on hip-centred forward bends, keeping our spines neutral. “Watch what people do with their heads,” he said. Well, look at that. There we go again, moving our heads without paying attention to them, necks kinked backwards even when they think they’ve kept them in a line for the whole manoeuvre. Nope. Even though they are attached, here we all are, losing our heads. It was a humbling moment.

This is why we do asana… or at least part of it. We train ourselves to know where we are in space, to pay attention to the subtle movements of our limbs and joints. Adopting a posture, we make gross movements with control. “Bend forward from the hips, going only as far as you can maintain a neutral spine.” (1) And then, once we’re there, we can make the subtle adjustments necessary for the alignment of the asana.

For the last month, one of my key lessons has been Finding My Head.

As I take my seat, where is my head? Slouching at the table, reading something on the screen, my head slides forward and its weight is placed on my hand, straining my neck. I notice, correct, notice, correct. The principle of non-violence applies: I do not call myself names or roll my eyes. Just notice, straighten. Move the weight into the weight-bearing column to relieve the stress on the muscles. As it becomes a habit, I have noticed that I have to correct less frequently. It gets easier to bend and get out the laundry without kinking my neck. I can sit at the keyboard longer and knit for longer periods of time without pain in my shoulders and hands.

This is the thing I want to teach in my yoga classes: it isn’t about the time on the mat. Think of the class as a lab for life. Here you are in a stripped-down environment with distractions kept to a minimum. The job is to pay attention to the body, and the breathing, and the mind. We do it on the mat to learn it as a skill. And then we discover that the job is always to pay attention to the body, and the breathing, and the mind. The mind is racing: bring it back to the task at hand. The breathing is shallow, jerky, warning us to listen… anxiety? Fear? Are we folded up and feeling draggy? The body is overstressed, reaching for sugar to keep running, or warning us at the limit of our extension that we are about to overstretch and pull something. Listen.

For now, I start with my head. Where is my head? It turns out that I’d lose it, even though it is attached.

1. People don’t like this instruction; they seem to want to touch their toes however they can get there. But then they miss the great benefit of going slowly, taking the lessons as they come.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: practice, the body, work, yoga | 2 Comments »

Selling Education (Part 1)

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Seonaid

As I may have mentioned, I have spent much of the last 8 months immersed in marketing courses. There’s a knack to marketing, but it’s not rocket science… and I would know.(1) It makes perfect sense. Figure out what you have that’s worth selling, to whom, and how to find and contact those people that will go, “ooh! ooh! That’s exactly what I’m looking for! I’m so glad you found me!” and shower you with money and compliments. (That’s called “social proof”, BTW.)

At any rate, one day I was sitting with my Book of Many Questions spread in front of me, and it said, “Clear benefits that you offer: ” And I froze, like a deer caught in headlights. Benefits. Of education that doesn’t come with a degree that allows you to participate in the ongoing education process… what is the intrinsic benefit of education? What are the instrumental benefits? What is education for, anyway? (1b)

Fortunately (I guess), I have already spent several years considering that set of questions. So I had a starting point, at least. (2)

Let me start at the top of my one-page mindmap that resulted from “Thinking about Education: In which I attempt to answer the question, why should anybody pay me to teach them something in the first place?”, (3) on which is written “Heuristics” and “Hermeneutics”. I invoke the sociological concept of “ideology” as a failure to recognize that a worldview is a temporary model, an interpretation (if you will) of the universe (the text). It includes a portion that compares Fractals, Emergence, and Entropy to the transmission and memory of stories, and George Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory. Human needs appear on a spectrum from “staying alive” to “being whole”, there is a comparison of consciousness and reactivity… Myth. Spiritual Materialism. Communities of practice. Problems of translation. “Physicists speak math.” Neil Postman’s point that as teachers we must necessarily sacrifice comprehensiveness for coherence… and it ends with the following statement:

The purpose of education is to communicate (as clearly as we can) the stories and models that (in our experience) provide effective means of predicting and influencing the patterns of the universe (1) of which we are a part, (2) which we can affect, and (3) to which we are subject.

And then I sat back, and thought, “Well, then, what does it mean that we’ve made it a private good?” (4) and then I went to Toronto for a week and wrote poems instead of coming up with an answer.

To be continued…

1. That joke is one of the fringe benefits of a physics education.
1b. I also don’t know who my target market is. Really, what I’ve learned is that I don’t think like a marketer. Or possibly that marketing is harder than rocket science. Or maybe that I’m better at rocket science than I am at marketing.
2. Honestly? This would be easier if I knew less. Then I’d be able to take a side, dig my heels in, and puff smoke at anyone who took a contrary position.
3. You are in no way expected to follow and/or believe the free-association that follows.
4. As you can see, I wandered away from the marketing problem and back to the one that I was writing about five years ago, which falls into the “important, but not urgent” category.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: education, work, Writing | 1 Comment »

On Genius, Enlightenment and The Voices

Posted on March 12, 2012 by Seonaid

There is a Buddhist fable about a traveller who arrives at an enlightened sage. “Please, master,” he says. “Please. I want to know how to become enlightened.”

“Are you sure?” asks the sage.

“Oh, yes. Absolutely.”

“Are you willing to go through whatever it takes?”

“Anything. I’ll do anything.”

The sage looked him in the eye, decided that it was called for, and immediately turned into a demon. For the rest of the man’s days he was pursued by this demon, who hit him incessantly with a stick and screamed, “NOW! NOW! NOW!”

I came across an article this week on Alexandra Franzen’s fabulous blog, Unicorns for Socialism. In this piece, she takes on the idea of genius as something you are, and reframes it (with reference to Malcolm Gladwell) as a state of being passionately in love with something.

This reminded me of Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk (in which she described the success of Eat, Pray, Love as “freakish”, and admitted that it left her terrified, because, hey, what do you do for an encore???) She suggested that we would be better off thinking of genius as the Romans did, not as something you are, but as something you have. The Genius, The Daemon, The Muse. That thing outside yourself, and also inside, that grabs your consciousness and demands that you write, make art, pursue your question until all hours of the day and night, sometimes at the cost of family, friendships, and your physical needs. Do THIS. it demands, and you do. Maybe kicking and screaming, maybe resentfully, maybe with a loud rational voice questioning the wisdom of quitting your 6-figure job to become an elementary school teacher, but you DO it.

I have one of those.

It feels a lot like that demon in the first story. It is very concerned with ethics, impact, and honesty. It is not forgiving of transgressions. It shakes me awake at 3 in the morning and says, “Get up! Write this down. Now!”

“Oh,” I mumble. “It’s late. I’m tired. I’ll do it in the morning.”

“No, you’ll forget! Get up! Get up! Do it, NOW!”

So I do. Because it has never been wrong. Yes, I will forget by morning. Yes, they are always the thoughts I didn’t know were kicking around in there, like they have gelled in my sleep. (1) And yes, when I get up the next morning, I am always surprised by what I wrote, and glad I did it… although tired. So, so tired. The last month has been like that a lot. Pulling over to the side of the road to scratch things down, calling people to ask them questions when it strikes me so that I don’t forget, and falling into bed at the end of the day, exhausted, at 9 p.m.

There’s another voice, though, and it is sinister. It sounds similar, worries about the same things, concerns itself with my accomplishments, but it does so with a nasty little twist. Whereas the one is merely unconcerned with trivialities like food, water, and sleep, the other has that oily tone to its “encouragement”. “Do this… or you will be a complete and utter failure.” It holds me back (“Nobody really wants to hear what you have to say! Just go get a job like everybody else does. What makes you think you’re so special?”) and then blames me for listening to it (“Oh, you see. You were thinking about that 10 years ago, and now it’s a New York Times bestseller, and what have you done with the last 10 years?!?”) It is absolutely and utterly incoherent, and seems to exist for the sole purpose of destroying me.

Why do we even have that voice?

What could possibly be the evolutionary benefit of a part of consciousness that makes you sick with self-loathing?

Yes, I know the solution: stop listening to that voice/those voices. They don’t even make any sense. But this is so much easier said than done. One teacher taught us to personify them and address them directly, calling them The Inner Critic. (“How,” I ask rhetorically, “did I wind up with an anarcho-capitalist in my suite of inner critics?”) Another calls them The Monsters and suggests that we recognize that they are trying to protect us (from humiliation, from rejection, from making mistakes). I sit in meditation, learning to disidentify. “I am not my thoughts. They do not mean anything. They are not the real world, they are an inaccurate story about the real world. I do not know the future, or what will happen if I take this action.”

The trick, I think, is to learn to tell these two apart. The Genius, although caring little for my creature comforts, personal goals, or professional success, does nothing to undermine me. “She” (because it is always my own voice that I hear, regardless of what it is saying) merely wants me to do it all, do it now, and get it done. The task itself is the driving force. Those other voices want… Well, they don’t really want much of anything. They just want me not to do whatever it is. They are the anti-genius. They are the voices of silence, conformity, placid enoughness, and they want, more than anything, for me to Just Shut Up. Be Invisible. Stay Down Where Nobody Can See You. Draw No Attention. And if they have to resort to reminding me of all the times that I listened to them in the past, and use that as proof that I’m meant to Stay Down and Shut Up, so be it. Coherence is not one of their strong suits.

And what, you may ask, does this have to do with enlightenment?

I’m not sure. But I hear that somewhere along the path, we must learn to stop listening to those voices of the anti-genius.

This is the calling: Keep Showing Up. There are thoughts that need thinking and words that need writing, and paintings that need painting, and songs that need singing.

I know that I am positing a Numinal world here; I know that it is not compatible with my rational scientific training. But it is compatible with my experience. The things I have said and done and written that mattered most, when I opened my mouth and the words poured out, and they were exactly what the person needed to hear at that time, or when I looked at something when I was finished and thought, “Where did that come from?”… those things feel like they came through me, not from me. I cannot make ideas. I can only express them. If they are forming in my mind, unbidden, what part do “I” have in this? Who am I, really? I’m the one with the hands, and the voice, and the body. And there is something in/beside/through me that wants speaking. So I speak it. (2)

Because I could really use a break from this three in the morning stuff.

1. I once learned a difficult quantum mechanics derivation in my sleep. (Time independent perturbation theory. True story.) It is a very strange thing, this brain.
2. And then hit “Publish” even in the agony of self-doubt. And get back to my other job, because dinner ain’t gonna make itself.

Filed under: Essays and Musings, WorldView | Tagged: genius, good-enough, meditation, philosophy, work, Writing | 2 Comments »

Dancing into the Future

Posted on February 16, 2012 by Seonaid

I don’t know what comes next.

I mean, I really have no idea what I’m going to do. There will be things that I’ve started (raising kids, building the greenhouse, making the beer) that need finishing. (And by “finishing,” I mean, “continued commitment over a period of days-to-months-to-years-to-TheRestOfMyLife without which all previous effort is wasted”) But when people ask me, “What do you do?”

I just don’t know.

I don’t believe that I can slap on a bunch of identities and pretend that somehow I’ve answered the question, although that is the convenient (and accepted) way of doing things. “Tell me which boxes you fit in, and then I’ll know what to talk to you about.” I tried that. It sucked.

Yet I’ve spent the last several months trying to answer this question, because I am assured that without a valid answer, I will never Make Anything Of Myself. That is to say, I may continue to be somebody’s wife and mother, but nobody will ever pay me for any of the things I already know how to do if I can’t package them up into a nice neat package. With a job title. Or a snappy statement of problem and solution. (I help people who something something… by doing something something… and then their lives are spectacular and they become millionaires! Of course, if I knew how to do that, I would have done it by now. Because sure, money won’t buy happiness… but it would buy me a trip to the Caribbean, and that might be fun. Or solar panels, and that would be cool!) And (They say) if I can’t answer this question, nobody will ever pay me to do anything more interesting than move objects around and occasionally hand them to other people ever again. No pressure.

What I do: I Think. A Lot. I slide from one worldview to another the way that most people change their clothes. I insist that this is a good thing. I refuse, steadfastly, to take a stand without adequate evidence. Sometimes I believe in god, sometimes I believe in gods, and occasionally I even believe in G*d. (But not very often.) And sometimes I don’t. I have moments of complete nihilism, although they are becoming fewer and farther between, being replaced with the ground of a firm agnosticism and meditation practice. Sometimes I am absolutely convinced that I’ve got it figured out, and that I’ve got something that is worth teaching… which is, I think, how to be comfortable in your life even when you aren’t sure of anything. See how that’s a hard thing to pin down? Slippery, that. Dancing your way through The World As it Is. Even when you don’t know how that world is.

This is the essence of Practice – to hear the music and let it move you. To find your core strength so that you can dance with abandon. To bring yourself into balance again, and again, and again, whether your house is tidy or not, whether your clothes reflect your inner self or not, whether you perceive your body to be what everybody else (the mythic They) wants it to be… or not. Whether you have managed to meet even one of the targets on this month’s women’s magazines, or business magazines, or any of the other ways our society finds to remind you, “Oh, yeah. You suck!” To find joy in embodied consciousness, even when you are waking up with existential angst at 3 in the morning. Perfection in imperfection. Spectacular mediocrity. How to have the best-damn-average life out there and revel in it!

There have been times in my life when I Knew. I always turned out to be wrong. Now, I don’t know… but I have a vague feeling that I might be right for a change.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: good-enough, philosophy, self, truth, work | 14 Comments »

Don’t Link to Your Blog. Ever.

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Seonaid

(Anita: Don’t read this. It’ll just piss you off. This warning is only for Anita. And it’s only on account of you don’t want me to worry so much what other people think. I don’t think it is a generally pissing-off kind of post.)

I have recently started hanging out a fair amount on Google+. I like G+ a lot; the structure of the posts with threading, and the ability to make and find public posts makes it a good place to meet new folks, find new readers, and find new conversational partners. It’s great for that. I go there to look for interesting writers and to post my own links. That’s what I’m there for.

So, yesterday, one of the Big Names (that is to say, somebody whose followers run into the thousands who gets referred to a lot by the other Big Names) that I follow told the people that she follows that she didn’t grant them permission to “pitch” her on their social networks, and said that she wanted us not to post links to our blogs, because if she wanted to read them, she’d be reading them already. Note that this was not a request not to send her links directly, but not to even post them to our public streams because that is like standing on a street corner trying to get people to come into our restaurants. If she wanted the food, she’d come in, already. Then she asked, “What does this bring up in you?”

So, before I go on, let me put this in context. This is part of a wider, “Blogging is dead,” zeitgeist that seems to be developing among the well-established:

Blogging lacks intimacy. People’s posts are either generic or stop short of what they could be if only the writers weren’t feeling confined by their social context. Real writers are sending directly to the inbox, only via permission, and all this blogging people are doing (so 2010) is messing up our public spaces.

Oh. And (from another writer) if people aren’t sharing your writing, it’s probably because it sucks, and if you just keep doing it for a few more years so you’ve had enough life experience and you learn to actually write and have some ideas, then maybe it will be interesting enough for me to bother sending a link your way. (This last one was from a twenty-something online-something expert. He’s single. He travels the world solo. He doesn’t blog any more. It doesn’t meet his needs.)

What does this bring up in me??? 275 posts later I’ve got 25 subscribers and now I’m not even supposed to try and find any new readers? What it brings up in me? I suck. Nobody wants to read my writing. If I were any good, I’d be “successful” by now. How dare I continue to pollute the world with my ideas??? I’ve been compared to a huckster flogging bad food that she crosses the street to avoid. I felt sucker punched. I felt like throwing up.

So, yeah. It brought stuff up.

And then (after several minutes of “I suck” angst) I thought, “How dare she tell me that I’m not allowed to offer my ideas to the world in a public forum? One in which she can make me disappear with a single click of the mouse. If she needs quiet that badly, why is she following all of us???”

The thing is, she writes about non-violent communication and boundaries.

Meditate. Breathe deeply. Talk it out for several hours. Non-violent communication and boundaries. She has the right to ask for something to meet a perceived need in herself. I have the right to say, “No.” I don’t even have to justify my, “no,” but in this case, I will. She has it entirely within her control whether she sees my public posts or not. I don’t have to do anything to change that. In my perception, she has made up a rule about public behaviour, and then applied it to the world around her, and then told us that we are rude for breaking it. I think that her asking me (us) to change my (our) (arguably perfectly reasonable, possibly even intended) behaviour for her comfort crosses a boundary into a presumed intimacy. THIS is why I’m so upset. At least, it is my best guess of why I’m so upset. I’m sure that several hours of therapy could add layers upon layers of upsettedness, but I’ve already spent an entire day on this, and I need to move on now. (This has spawned another entire post about whether blogging is, in fact, dead, or whether some of the super-bloggers, having already reaped its rewards, are maybe not in the best position to declare what the rest of us should be doing… but I digress.)

My online writing and social media use meets some of my needs for social and intellectual connection. I want to talk about strange esoteric things and explore challenging intellectual constructs. I don’t have employment in any of the careers I was trained for. I have three kids. I live in a rural community, which means that I have lots of access to personal interactions, that they know me at the post office, and that the new school principal already knew what my son’s extracurricular interests were. I’m pretty happy with my life. But it does somewhat limit my opportunities to stay up drinking beer and talking about… y’know. Grad school pub stuff. I get my grad school pub stuff by meeting strangers on the internet and striking up a conversation… like in grad school, but with less hand waving. And less beer. And less hand-waving-beer-sloshing. If they (the friends I haven’t met yet) aren’t sharing their links, I will never have the chance to meet them. And if I don’t share my links, my poor little baby ideas will sit here languishing, unread and unloved. Poor ideas. This makes me sad.

Fly little ideas. Make friends! Find other ideas! Make new ideas. (I kind of live in a universe where ideas have form, and it is my responsibility to nourish them the same way I do plants and pets.) And if you don’t want to see my ideas, please look somewhere else, rather than asking me to shut up, no matter how politely you do it.

‘K. Thanks. Bye.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: blogging, discipline, ideas, self, work, Writing | 33 Comments »

Thinking about Thinking

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Seonaid

When this picture was taken, I was actually thinking about trees. Photo credit: D.J. King, (who does some wonderful portraits and lives in Calgary, if you happen to need such a thing.)

You might not be surprised to hear that I’m big on metacognition. It’s one of my things. It might actually be my thing.

I have struggled with this, because in the academic world I was brought up in, one does not become an expert in process, one becomes an expert in object. The topics in most courses are existing thoughts and models of the world, not where those came from or what to do with them. When we write papers, we are expected to summarize the results of our thought processes, not to expose the thought processes themselves. (This mistake tends to lead to such comments on undergrad papers as, “rambling and incoherent.” This may be true. It might alternatively be, “circuitous and experimental.” One is bad writing, the other art. Avant garde or confused? Sometimes only time will tell. Although usually? It’s just bad writing.)

When I was studying physics, I was interested in the experimental methods, not the outcomes of the experiment. I fear that I didn’t care about the crystal structures of halogenated methanes, although the idea that you could use particular methods on particular materials intrigued me. I liked preparing samples, running experiments, figuring out what experiment might work next… but the main body of the work was in analyzing the data, sitting in front of a computer doing the same thing again, and again, and again.

When I was studying education, I was interested in what claims could be made and how to support them. I like teaching. No, I love teaching. I live for the moment that the eyes light up! But I don’t just want to teach the things I already learned. I want to teach people how to learn. Why are doing this? What’s the point?

When I was working with faculty members to develop their courses, I was interested in (and tasked with) the structure, not the content. I designed a course about designing courses. I’m all about the framework.

Until very, very recently, I have considered this a flaw. A failure in my character. An inability to commit to one line of investigation and see it thought to its conclusion. Occasionally, I have despaired. OK. Frequently, I have despaired. I am a generalist, I have said, in a world that rewards specialization. But it’s not quite true. I have been telling myself a false story, one which is attached to a model of The University as The Place where thinkers go. If I can’t find a place there, I can’t be a thinker. More recently, The Media has supplanted The University. If only I could get something published, if only somebody in a place of judgement would deem my thoughts, my writing, my self worthy, my existence would be justified. It would be OK to be a generalist. I would have value in the world.

So here’s a different story for me to consider: I am an expert in metacognition. What have I done for 10,000 hours? I have investigated my own thought processes, the nature of thought, the support of truth claims, the structure of disciplinary knowledge, the construction of coherent models, and the ways in which teachers and students communicate their models to one another. I have constructed and torn down so many possible ways of knowing inside my own head that it’s a constant renovation project. I have thought deeply about thinking. I have been reluctant to make these claims, because they are the landscape of the philosopher, the professor, the specialist in the discipline. I tend to believe that I’m not entitled to form a critique of something until I have succeeded at it, and my strongest critique is of the structures in the education system, particularly the post-secondary education system. And then I think, “Well, maybe I’m just bitter?” I ponder, construct, deconstruct, consider, philosophize… and come back again and again and again to, “People are going to say that I’m just bitter because I couldn’t make it as an academic.”

I still love the university! It has libraries, and theatres, and people to talk to, and frankly, it pays the bills. (“Many of my dearest friends are professors,” she protested feebly.) But honestly? There’s some truth there. I’m a little bitter. I’m a little frustrated that I have never found my path, that I’ve never had a full time permanent job, that I have become an expert in something that everybody says is so valued in our society, but that I can’t seem to find a way of turning it into gainful employment other than by trimming off the majority of the skill and finding a market for the portion that is left. I happen to think that it is wasteful to have me working at a job that only requires a high school diploma. I find myself apologizing for my education, which is both too much and inadequate, depending on where I stand.

Well, no more, I say! I’m thinking about thinking, and I’m proud! My next two posts are going to be titled, “I see your Levinas and raise you a Wittgenstein” (which is about internet comments and the limits of knowledge. I promise it requires no knowledge of either Levinas or Wittgenstein.) and “Why are we here, anyway?” (which is, tangentially, also about internet comments). There will also be, as time goes on, “Writing about Writing”.

All of which is an elaborate precursor to saying that I’m back, and that I’m in transition to taking my own writing seriously as a tool of engagement with the world. I’m willing to be subjective because I’m a subject! I have a position. And part of my position is that we generalists need to find a different way of being in the world, one that doesn’t require us to leave behind, immerse, drown, or amputate parts of our selves. When we judge ourselves by the same standards by which we are judged, those of the specialist and the expert, of course we are found wanting. We can’t change that part of the world, but we don’t have to subject ourselves to it. (See what I did there? Subject/subject. Noun/verb. Actor/acted upon? Oooh! I love when words do that.)

And then we need to find new ways of making a living. Because waiting for the path to appear? That way madness lies.

(I know. I’ve thought about it.)

Filed under: Essays and Musings, WorldView | Tagged: discipline, education, philosophy, storytelling, thinking, truth, work | 9 Comments »

You know what stat I really want?

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Seonaid

This is a self-referential post, although I have managed to avoid making it recursive. For now. Check back later.

I have been watching the stats on my blog with interest. (Oh, c’mon, bloggers. You know you do it, too.) They have been increasing consistently since I started posting on a regular basis last fall, and really started going up when I started posting daily. When I began, I knew who was reading, because they only knew the blog was here because I told them. Friends, family. Then friends of friends and casual acquaintances started mentioning it when I ran into them downtown. It is a little disconcerting having somebody ask, “Was the wildlife park very busy on Thursday?” when you haven’t seen them for weeks, but I’m learning to roll with it.

For example, I bumped into someone at the library, and commented that I had enjoyed the book she was checking out. She said, “Oh, I know. I read your review. That’s why I’m reading it.” It’s a little surreal, like maybe my brain has started going off and having some other virtual life that my body had been left out of. I’m just going along, eating my supper, and meanwhile the writing is off catching up with other people on some other time scale. Maybe that’s what’s so addictive about it. It’s kind of like having extra time!

It’s pretty exciting meeting somebody completely new via the internet, starting up conversations, going back and forth between blogs. Every now and then, it seems, somebody comes along and reads a lot of my posts in rapid succession (I assume that this is what happens on days with high hits, but where each post has only one reader. Actually, that was what prompted this post. Hi, person, if you are in the middle of doing that. Stop and say hello! Even if you are my mom, or something.)

But you know what I really want to know is… how many words are in my blog? How much have I written? I suspect that by the end of the year I will be up into the 225,000 word range. This pleases me, and it feels more like something I can put a goal on. It’s like producing the volume of a really big book, only without those pesky problems of consistent voice, or internal coherence, or Actually Writing A Book. Don’t get me wrong, I like having readers. I’ll admit that I feel a little weird having “readers”; it feels pretentious, or something. But it makes it feel more like I’m doing something, which, as I mentioned a couple of days ago can be a bit of a problem. (Oh. That was just yesterday. OK, so it’s a recurring theme this week then.) Getting people to read is awesome, but I don’t really have much control over that. What I do have control over is the effort, so the stats of how much I’ve put into it turn out to be valuable to me. They may even exist, but I haven’t yet managed to put my hands/mouse on them.

In the dark of the night, when I am making much-too-long to-do lists, this is the sort of thing that makes me think, “Maybe I should move over to a .org site.” Not so much the particular question, but the fact that once I got up to speed, I’m sure I could throw together a script that would tell me that in an afternoon*. I can see the metadata Right There… But then I’d be programming, not writing. Curiosity would kill this ~~cat~~ blog, although it might have a lot more features.

Gee, she wondered aloud. I wonder whether anybody at WordPress noticed this post…

* Only I probably wouldn’t have to, because I’m sure somebody else already wanted to know the same thing.

Filed under: Day-to-Day, Essays and Musings | Tagged: blogging, PostADay2011, work | 6 Comments »

Talking Vaginas

Posted on March 10, 2011 by Seonaid

Oddly enough, this post is not the G-rated stuff of my normal daily routine. Please consider yourself warned. Although it’s almost entirely about acting, not sex.

I went back onstage this week after a near-14-year hiatus. And what did I use to get my acting chops back in gear? Did I, perchance, go out for a nice bit part in a one-act? Hang out in the chorus? No, no. I went on stage in front of my (small) local community and performed The Vagina Workshop:

“I had to give up the fantasy… the enormous, life consuming fantasy that someone or something was coming to do this for me… to live my life, to choose direction, to give me orgasms.”

Now for me, walking onstage to talk about masturbation, even with a script in hand, was a stretch. For all that my brain is inhabited by a radical leftie, my body projects a rather conservative outward appearance (temporarily pink hair aside.) My use of swear words is generally limited to situations in which I am extraordinarily angry, or when I drop something on my foot. As I mentioned in my first post on this subject, I would prefer for people to not notice my gender, and ideally interact with me intellectually, not via the body. It was great “work,” this role. After the first read-through, I volunteered to read one of the monologues that I was not entirely comfortable with, rather than the three I had originally said I was able to do. Because after I read it, and heard it, I believed it. I believed the story of the woman who went to The Vagina Workshop to learn how to find pleasure in her own body.

As an actor, it is my job to believe the story I am telling. If I don’t believe it, neither will the audience. In that moment, I must suspend my own discomfort, silence the voice at the back of my mind which is saying, “But you just made the whole audience picture YOU naked!” Say the words on the page even if I would NEVER EVER utter them in “real” life. That’s my job. If I’m/they’re not uncomfortable, at least a little bit, I haven’t shown up. And if my character found liberation through masturbation, I’d better darn well convince the audience that it is at least possible.

I made them laugh, I teared them up. I convinced them. I convinced myself. I did my job. And now I can breathe again.

Filed under: Day-to-Day | Tagged: acting, feminism, PostADay2011, self, storytelling, the body, work | 3 Comments »

Finding the Holy Grail

Posted on February 19, 2011 by Seonaid

Before Holy Grail, Fix Cars, Ferry Children. After Holy Grail, Fix Cars, Ferry Children

This week we finally got to a point that we’ve been working towards for the last twenty years: my husband got tenure. I think that this is an occasion that should include a ceremony involving funny hats, because lacking such ceremony, we’ve had trouble raising the energy that such an accomplishment merits.

Tenure is a widely misunderstood thing. It is a mark point in an academic career at which a university declares your work (finally) “good enough”. All that other stuff you did up until now – it is all weighed and measured, and stamped with a grade, and if your grades are good enough, then you get to stay. It is a big deal. Frankly, it is a really big deal, because a denial of tenure is tantamount to dismissal from the institution, and in the modern academic world, that frequently amounts to a dismissal from the entire academic community. So. Phew. Tenure. Protection of academic freedom. More ability to be controversial (which means something significantly more to a radical queer theorist than it does to a physicist, but, nonetheless. Yay! Academic freedom!) It is not a license to be sloppy or bad at your job, or to start doing bad research in other fields, although those are the stories that usually make the national press. It is confirmation. The last twenty years of work have paid off. You are “good enough.”

You would think that this would make us jubilant, that we would have a big celebration, that we would feel something resembling happiness. But in the end, the path was so long, and the final step so insignificant that there was no energy left for celebration. Relief, yes. Excitement, no.

In fact, he didn’t even announce it. It simply came up in conversation, “Well, I’ve got tenure now…” Me: “Your tenure came through? When did that happen?” Him: “Oh, my tenure letter came from the president a couple of days ago.” Me: “That’s nice. We should go for dinner or something.” Conversation continued along original lines. Then we couldn’t get the flat tire off the van, a necessary step in getting the whole family to dinner. We did manage to get the kids to their swimming lessons in the smaller car, and open a bottle of our homemade wine.

After tenure, fix cars, ferry children.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: education, life, PostADay2011, work | 10 Comments »