I’m still alive.

Okay.  Defended the dissertation two weeks ago.  Long story.  I got myself so completely high on caffeine that my heart was beating 92 times a minute, sitting still.  Seriously; I checked twice. I don’t think I’ve ever been as nervous about anything in my entire life. At a hospital, car crash, bike crash, social event, you’re not sitting alone thinking all day before your 4:30 event. I probably should have been more social that day, but I had no patience for drama, which seems everywhere these days — even my own.  Anyway, I had all day to think of all the ways I’d screw it up, since I’m not only a terrible public speaker but also intimidated by the idea of a room full of philosophers versus me and me alone.

Went through the defense.  Committee suggested some clarifications, treatments, etc., including fixing my “tone,” which some considered “flippant.”  Upon revising it, I realized they were actually right about that.  Not a big deal.  Everyone has to make some changes after a defense, I’m told.  My director called me “Doctor.”  Some of the changes took me a while because I wanted to make sure they were right on the first try, and some took less because I already had the research.  No one asked any of the questions I thought they would, though.

Nonetheless, the most unpleasant thing about my entire PhD program was over.  But, with Baby on the way and the official electronic submission deadline looming, this meant that I was MIA for a week and half.  My life was:

Wake up.
Work at job.
Dissertation at lunch.
Work at job.
Go to market.
Make dinner.
Work on dissertation.
Bed.
Repeat, and, on weekend, replace job work with housework, laundry, a food drive, etc.
(Also insert people being so disrespectful as to demand my time, knowing full well what was going on.  I’m very generous with my time, I think, but I needed it this week for myself and my family.)

None of this was good for my sanity, though it’s been incredibly beneficial for my work ethic. As in, I have one now. I finished revising the dissertation and making all of the changes Saturday. Since then, I’ve been painting, caulking, cooking, shopping, cleaning and organizing in preparation for Baby.  It’s non-stop, and I haven’t been online much, save a little on Facebook.

Last night, I had to take apart my [cheap] caulking gun because I bent the innards. Damned spring shot me in the freakin eyeball which, as you can imagine, hurts like hell today. Doesn’t look as bad as it did yesterday, though.  Still, it calls to mind certain episodes of “The Simpsons.”

Now I’m working with my director to get it all final and done and gone.  It feels too good to be true, and it hope it works.  Because once Baby is born (any day now, literally), I don’t want to have to work on this ever again.

Brighter morning.


You may be aware that I’ve been working with my dissertation director to get a date for our defenses before Baby comes. This will involve a train to DC, a train to Chicago, a train to Carbondale, then the same on the way back. Two days of traveling each way. And, you know, a public defense wherein people who didn’t read it can come and ask annoying questions.  Not a light trip to make with a pregnant wife, my own neuroses and not a ton of cash for traveling.  But, it needs to get done.

I met with my director in November in Washington (took the train down one Friday morning) when he was there for a conference. He promised we’d work this out. He also lightened my spirits by telling me that the defense, in our department, is “celebratory.” That is, it’s finished and a done deal before I get there. The trouble with that is that you don’t get a defense until it’s perfect. Ready to go. I enjoyed myself that morning because my director is a very nice person with whom I have a good bit in common. We took a nice walk on a beautiful day around the Capital, and I ran (literally) to get my train home in a very good mood.

I finished my draft in summer 2007. I didn’t ever look at it until March 2009, when I did some proofreading and sent it after my bike accident in like late April or early May. Asked about maybe a July defense. Then everyone got busy, and nothing happened. When we found out about Baby in August, I emailed my director to see about scheduling, and there was a good bit of suggestions, including tying Emerson into my work. There are worse assignments than having to read a bunch of Emerson, I joked.

Then part one of three took a while to get in shape to everyone’s liking. Part two is Nietzsche, and my director is not a Nietzsche guy. I have some comments to work on for that part, but the Nietzsche guy they brought onto the committee hasn’t had a look yet. That scares me a little. The rest of the comments for the last part are in the mail, too.

So, my director told me to “bug” him as much as I had to when I met with him in November. But I don’t like to do that to people and especially not to people I like, like him. But I did yesterday. I flat out asked for a date. And, he gave me three days in February he thinks would work, and one specific date at 3:30pm (Central Time) that he is shooting for. He’ll get back to me when he gets confirmation from the rest of the committee.

So. Holy shit. I didn’t realize how much this was hanging over my head! We played Scene It? (Simpsons Deluxe Edition) until late last night and slept until 10:04am (our anniversary), to a sunny day and a big Baby belly.  I couldn’t remember why my mood was so light!  Whenever I think about how long we’ve been back in Baltimore, it’s tainted by my dissertation still hanging over my head, driving me crazy.  It almost makes me feel like a failure.  I never thought I wouldn’t finish, but I never realized that a good number of the people who start PhD programs don’t get to the prospectus, and a lot of them never finish it.  Yikes.

I’m still nervous that the Nietzsche guy is going to go nuts over my Nietzsche work.  But, well, if he does and if the date is set, that simply means that I have to pump up on coffee and do whatever he suggests.  Simple.  Easy, no, but it’ll get done.  While we’re not traveling to my favorite place or for my favorite reason, we are traveling.  And I do love that.  Won’t get to do that again for a long time.  And, next time, we’ll get to show Baby the train and how fun it is.

And I can’t believe that, with it being a possibility for so long, I’ll actually be Dr. Johnny officially when I get my diploma in the mail (can’t take that trip with a newborn to walk on stage, but I won’t care with Baby here anyway) in a few months.  Wow.  I think I need a new nickname on camping trips/cycling.  Dan mentioned Doc once, and I like it.

Too much wisdom literature.

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A few years ago, my friend sent me a copy of Baltasar Gracián‘s The Art of Worldly Wisdom. It is, by the way, excellent reading. It calls to mind Marcus Aurelius and his Meditations, and I mean that in a very good way.  I was reading it a bit last night, and of course, I was struck by just how damned smart and relevant the maxims still are today.

I was also struck by how I was reading them: as interesting bits of information.  Not wisdom — interesting paragraphs.  I thought that, perhaps, it was the text.  Maybe it’s not as awesome as I thought.  But I’ve noticed in recent months and years that I seem to gloss over even my favorites like Thoreau, the Buddha, Emerson, Nietzsche, et al. Am I getting dense?  I don’t think so — though that is certainly a possibility, and there are certainly people who would say so.  (Ahem.)  I suspect that this is a result of studying philosophy for my entire adult life.

On the one hand, I think I might be somewhat numb to wisdom literature!  I’ve read so many wise things that other people have written and acted on so little of it that it’s all just a bunch of clever words most of the time.  When Aurelius reminds us that stupid people act stupidly and that we waste time and energy being upset about it, I still get upset when selfish people act that way.  How else do selfish people act?  Selfishly!

On the other hand, my philosophical undertakings have largely been academic ones.  By that I mean that I also read and have read immense amounts of bullshit.  We don’t act on philosophy; we write about it! And then we read about it and then write about that.  And then read that and write about what’s been written about, etc.  I think a part of me suspects that all wisdom and philosophy that we can read or learn from other people is just bullshit.

Am I claiming that a piece of philosophy that no one acts on is bullshit?  Yes.  Read some of my graduate papers that pissed off some of my professors (I was, after all, attacking their profession).  I’ve felt that way for a long time, and that’s a large part of the reason I decided not to pursue a career in academic philosophy. Why, then, did I pursue a doctorate?  I don’t know.  You imagine that you might be a different case, that you can keep your integrity and still gitterdunn.  Maybe I thought I would feel differently or that I might be wrong.  Maybe I was just too stupid and stubborn to stop.  That’s certainly the case now, where I’m finishing my PhD just to finish it and justify my time, energy and debt. (And, for the record, I got offered a spot teaching my own class at the exact school I always dreamed of teaching at just after my dissertation prospectus defense.  So, ahem, for the record, I didn’t simply wimp out of the search for a job.  I might have hurt the feelings of someone I care about who was looking out for me, too. I don’t know if I ever mentioned this.)

What’s my point?  I don’t know.  Maybe that the bullshit that gets forced on people in the academic discipline of philosophy poisons us against actually acting in a wiser fashion because the bullshit gets mixed in with the “real” wisdom (assuming that some of philosophy is actually wisdom literature, which I think is true).  I have known tons and tons of philosophers, and only a scant few of them acted like wiser people for their study of philosophy.  More likely, we just turn into snarky smartasses.  I wish I could count myself among the people who have studied philosophy and thereby act wiser for it.  Maybe it’s not philosophy.  Maybe it’s me.  Maybe it’s a flaw in the “type” of person who chooses to study philosophy for a living, since so few of us do anything about philosophy.  But something’s amiss.

They don’t just teach writing in school.

Revising my dissertation, I wonder if working in higher education/community engagement, outside of an academic discipline, hasn’t been better for my prose writing? I have to write for university administrators, nonprofit and community partners regularly, not to mention sometimes writing in order to convince people to do something they don’t really want to do. There’s a lot of pomp and false wit in the dissertation that I would never put into something for other people to read on paper like that these days.  Of course, blogging is full of pomp, almost necessarily so, so you probably haven’t noticed, as I haven’t until this morning. :)

Working in tides.

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I am not a constant worker. That is, I cannot sit for 8 hours doing the same thing. I never have been able to. Instead, I can usually get done said amount of work in a fraction of the time, with plenty of time for playing/relaxing. (Admitting this just might be why I got accused of being arrogant.) I work in spurts. But I don’t understand why my admitting a weakness (i.e., combination of a short attention span and just plain laziness) leads to charges of arrogance (ahem).

Anyway. School work. It usually happens that I do all my reading. Research. Notes. Outline. Bam, I sit down and write a seminar-length paper in one sitting, that needs minimal editing. My secret is thinking about it for a long time first, so that I really am only going through the formality of typing and composing actual sentences around the cute aphorisms I’m storing in my brain.  Really.  I’m so lazy and have so much trouble paying attention to anything that I have trick myself into working.  No shit.

I tricked myself into cranking out incredible amounts of work today leading to a robust introduction and first chapter of my dissertation.  I found delicious kernels of Pragmatism not only in Emerson, but also in Thoreau.  Textual references that are not bullshit and mis-quoted and taken out of context.  So instead of beefing up the scholarship on my definition of Pragmatism by quoting James scholars, I found a dialogue between Peirce, James, Emerson and Thoreau on the relation of thought and action.  Delicious.

I don’t know why I’m writing this.  I’m exhausted and just enjoyed a nice beer and should be reading a trashy novel before hitting the sack.  I suppose it’s largely because I spent the last few months of 2006 and the first half of 2007 researching and writing the damned thing without ever talking about it with anyone aside from my wife, who was also burdened with writing her own.

What is my dissertation about?

An exploration of the possible usefulness of hate.  Via an exploration of how pervasive hate is and what Pragmatism means to me; a discussion of Nietzsche’s view of hate using all of his published philosophical writing; proposed solutions for how to make hate useful.  Sounds sunny and easy, no?

I will admit for the first time to myself that I spent entirely too much time reading and reflecting on and writing about Nietzsche.  But they want scholarship.  Still, I spent over three months doing nothing but reading and taking notes on Nietzsche.  Do I really get him?  I’m sure some of my colleagues would say that I do not because I am not entirely familiar with the scholarship on him.  Somewhat familiar with it and equally bored by it.  I would, arrogantly, reply that I am familiar with Nietzsche‘s work, and I couldn’t give less of a shit what some deconstructionist in a cafe’ thinks about Freddy’s relationship with his mother or how this or that “scholar” had reduced all of the multifarious things Nietzsche said to one principle, phobia or sexual deviance.

That one might posit that another person might not “get” a philosopher because one spent more time reading the primary material than the secondary material is one of the reasons that I am leaving (and in most ways have already left) academic philosophy behind. Behind in an “I’m better than that” sense?  No, don’t get your panties in a bunch.  If reading philosophy journals and going to conferences is your thing, that’s cool.  You do yours, and I’ll do mine.

I can’t help but think that there’s a point where we’re supposed to stop reading about philosophy and reading people who write about it and what other people have written about what these people have written and start, you know, doing it.  Or is it really just an academic discipline and not a mode of living?

Don’t answer that.