Mystery Hole, Inc.

A screaming comes across the sky.

2008-09-04T04:19:39Z

The sound of my flaming engines, turning air into pure platonic propulsion, jetting me closer to my destination with no regard as to my state when I get there.

The presentation I just assembled for tomorrow's class was the equivalent of the midterm project I did for Bibliographic Methods and Methodologies way back in the day for the M.A. In other words, I learned how to do it in a month and a half, and after ten years off, decide to make myself do it again in a week.

The good reason, that I say out loud, is that it'll make things easier for me later in the term and it will get me in the good graces of the instructor. Whether or not I admit out loud any of the bad reasons (that this is my form of self-flagellation, that I'm pushing myself to breaking out of spite and comeuppance towards someone who's not even paying attention, that this is an attempt to stave off the derision and dismissal that some paranoid part of me thinks my cohort have in store for me for not being good enough...) remains to be seen.

But, hey, spending a late night at the library has its advantages. For one, I can sleep in a little longer tomorrow morning. Since I'm already caffeinated, when I get home, I'm going to listen to Hum and get a crack at Godel, Escher, Bach, which I checked out of the library in some mad moment when I had inexplicably told myself I would have spare time to read it.

Wants, and needs.

2008-09-03T16:28:04Z

There are things that everybody wants, and there are things that everyone needs. We need oxygen, for instance. Wants tend to be lower priority, or auxiliary to needs; a hungry person needs to eat, but there may not be things they want to eat.

It occurs to me that it's quite common, psychologically and even neurologically, to move things from their proper place in one category or another. Drug addiction - the brain rewires itself to need a substance that it previously simply wanted (not simply a feeling of needs: MRI scans of long-time addicts demonstrate that the actual functioning of the brain is reconfigured, neurons actually move, to accomodate the new paradigm, which is why withdrawal is difficult and painful).

And I am also thinking about something that is needed but not wanted, for whatever reason. Why people refuse medical treatment. Why suicidal ideation exists. The mind is capable of latching onto an idea, or creating such a strong aversion to an idea, that a hard barrier comes down between the want and the need. We do not cease to need oxygen, but in some people, it's possible to no longer want oxygen. This can lead to self-destructive behaviors, both great and small.

There are therapies to reconcile the two sides when they become imbalanced. Because conditioning is typically involved in the dysfunction, however, it's not easy or quick. Conditioning cannot simply be "broken", despite popular notions. For example, I have several conditioned responses of which I am aware. They were acquired over many, many years, and whenever I'm confronted by the stimulus, I instinctively panic and become despondent. I know this to be the case, but my neurons have had a path ground into them over the years, and I have to talk myself out of the state once it has occurred -- not going into the state is simply not an option. The way conditioning works is devious, too, because you can't simply be removed from the trigger stimulus for a long period of time and expect it to 'wear off'. Psychologists training dogs have found that conditioning actually becomes more ingrained if the stimulus-reflex connection is sporadic or infrequent. To truly destroy previous conditioning, a new counter-stimulus and response have to be established to drown out the old reflex.

This is an objective run-down of the problem I am currently faced with. The situation is both metaphor and literal: I have yet to find a proper counter-stimulus, administered for a long enough period, to overcome the conditioning already prevalent. As a result, the conditioning itself interferes with finding a stimulus, creates self-sustaining feedback, and consequently becomes just a little further enmeshed.

And, no, I'm not going to hand out the substitution cypher for the cryptogram.

Title update.

2008-08-27T19:56:26Z

(Not for the journal, for me.)

As part of my graduate assistantship, I have been appointed editorial assistant for the journal Studies in the Humanities.

As much as I would love to celebrate that right now, I have a stack of pages to proofread first. :D

I think I know how to win now.

2008-08-24T17:29:12Z

Perseverence is the key. I may not be able to kill the gremlin, but I can be stronger and faster than it is, and hold on tighter to what I want.

It seems to be working, too. And I'm going to say it out loud just to spite that little motherfucker, because if he shows his face and tries to mess this up again, I'll cave his head in with metaphorical fists of great justice.

The grinding of teeth.

2008-08-21T15:25:35Z

When I get my hands on the fucking gremlin, I will torture him until he disintegrates.

Not only have I had to suddenly scramble to keep the very good thing that was happening from spinning away in a sudden fit of chaos, I didn't sleep last night - tossing and turning all night, I managed barely to get two hours of sleep, and that fitful, fraught with really anxious dreams about deathtraps and ex-love interests. And, to top it all, apparently there is still mold in some of my bedding, and I woke up with an allergic skin reaction over a good portion of my body, and since I couldn't identify exactly where it was located, I had to drag the whole kit and caboodle down to the laundromat.

I was just starting to accept that things might be good for once, too.

Luck be a lady?

2008-08-20T18:01:17Z

Um, no. If you have real luck, then she is nothing like a lady. ;)

But, yeah, things tend to be going well here so far. [shoos away little gremlin over shoulder who tends to run and fuck things up as soon as I get positive] I am sitting on a 4.0 for the first half of my doctoral studies, and yesterday the admins came through with a half-time GA, which is split towards both tuition and stipend (meaning I work 10 hours a week, in exchange for half my tuition paid, and half the supplemental pay of a regular assistant). I'm scrambling to get my residency requirements taken care of in the time I have remaining (the deadline is the 30th), but it's gone well up 'til now.

And there's something else, which is important enough that I still can't mention it outright. [glares at gremlin]

There's always a part of me waiting for the shoe to drop: I fully expect some terrible thing to happen any minute now to ruin all the good that has started to accumulate. The longer I wait, the more anxious I get, which must be tempered by constant reminders to live in the good moments while they're here. About six months ago, I changed the greeting message on my phone's screen to "THINK POSITIVE!", and since then, I'm sure, the subliminal programming of seeing that day after day, even after I stopped being conscious of it, has to factor in somehow. I'm by no means a ball of sunshine [hissss] but it's admittedly a little easier to be confident in front of people who have no reason to know that I'm not actually confident.

Return of the returning.

2008-08-11T19:30:58Z

Plan: return to Huntington on Wednesday. I'm thinking I'll stay into the weekend (perhaps Saturday). I have need of reclaiming belongings that are in storage, now that I have my permanent Pennsylvania domicile. (Or as permanent as these things get.)

If things change, or come into clearer focus, I'll update here ASAP.

The lesson for today is:

2008-08-07T19:29:57Z

Apparently, I'm not worth sticking around for. And really, I never was.

I don't have any right to feel as eviscerated as I do, but I still feel it.

Already, the confidence I had been building up this summer about myself is brutally crushed into half its size.

A strange day has risen.

2008-08-01T16:30:53Z

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

One of my classmates was telling me just the other day, "It'll happen when you least expect it." However, this sort of sudden confluence has happened to me in the past on rare occasions, and I don't recall any of them amounting to anything, so I'm not going to expect anything this time either.

It's really hard to say what I feel, or what I ought to feel.

Note:

2008-07-29T22:57:10Z

the Consolers of the Lonely review has finally gone up. The Slip review is in the queue, but I've got lots of writing for class yet to complete.

Titles, and what they mean.

2008-07-29T20:24:41Z

No, not titles to journal posts. Though that is delightfully recursive. :D

So, now that I'm pretty well on my way towards a Ph.D., it comes time to start seriously thinking about the apellation "doctor". Some of the people who know me (especially online) have begun appending "doctor" to my handle, to the point that I have actually started to use "doctorparadox" in some places rather than the traditional "paradoxboy". (Criminy, I just realized I've been using that handle for nigh on THIRTEEN years. The internet is old. [wink])

But it is in names that we form identities. So, before long, I will be "Dr. Neal Stidham." (It was brought to my attention Sunday that, upon finishing comprehensives and hitting ABD, you can legitimately adopt the title.) If that's the case, then I need to start thinking about what it means to be "Dr. Neal Stidham" and not just "Neal Stidham". What kind of person is he? How do people see him? What does he do?

And try as I might, I can't really think of my life being that greatly different after completing the degree. I will be the same person - it won't fundamentally change who I am. Some of my cohort think of me already as "the theory guru" and expect I will publish some groundbreaking criticism and perhaps be the next Derrida standing at Johns Hopkins with the next "Structure, Sign and Play" (an idea I take with a healthy lump of salt). I joke lately that I'm going to have to invest in a tweed jacket and get used to lecterns. While these are just nods to the awareness that my academic career obviously will change - that's why I'm working on the doctorate, after all - I can't see myself being a different person. I'll still go home and listen to the same music. I'll still read webcomics. I'll still be extraordinarily patient with people I care about and horribly impatient otherwise. I'll still noodle badly on the guitar. I'll still love to sit down with friends around a good board game. I'll still have a temper, still be a hopeless romantic, and prefer small, quiet rooms with people I know to any public place or crowd.

In other words, the title is meaningless to the essence of who I am. It's something to be done, an accomplishment or benchmark, nothing more. I've already proven I can, also; if I haven't washed out after this summer, the program can't throw anything at me that I can't defeat. And in realizing that, there's a little Zen that creeps in: it seems a little more silly to worry so much about what I'm doing, and more worthwhile to just perform the act without thinking too hard about it.

Oh, and in two more days, I'll be shuttling stuff to the new apartment. Which makes me think that there are only six class days left in the summer, and reminds me to not get too Zen yet - there are papers to write. So enough outta me for now.

Trent sends me ghosts of the future.

2008-07-27T19:15:09Z

After procrastinating for various reasons, I downloaded NIN's The Slip and the first volume of Ghosts. After study-lunch today, will give a listen tonight; a review is probably forthcoming. (I actually have my review of The Raconteurs' Consolers of the Lonely written and saved on my hard drive; I just told myself I was going to edit a bit more before posting it, and it's been eternally deferred. Maybe I'll get to that tonight too.)

We'll have Skip Lackley with weather, right after these headlines.

2008-07-25T15:34:36Z

* This session proves more difficult than the previous one. The problem seems more logistic than material: while the coursework for these two classes combined ~~to form Voltron~~ are not significantly greater than last term's -- mostly it's the amount of reading, not the production of work -- I went into this term with my fuel cells depleted. The amount of energy I was able to (and did) marshal towards term 1 was prodigious, but it's not a level I have been able to maintain. The fear is that I won't be able to live up to the bar that was set previously, of course: I'm harder on myself than pretty much anyone else could be.

* Despite insomnia, both forced (caffeine) and involuntary (psychological), the amount of time my body tries to sleep continues to increase, seemingly unable to grasp that it won't stay asleep when it gets there. This, and the knotting of my muscles over the past week or so, convinces me that my stress is finally beginning to enter feedback stage. How this will affect me, given I seem to have pretty much no outlet for said stress, remains to be seen. I doubt it will make me rich and handsome.

* Speaking of which: there's no progress to speak of in terms of prospects for attractive company. Those tentative hopes I had have been swallowed by school. One of my cohort-mates, an older woman with whom I've had three of my four classes and who is part of the study/discussion group I started for the summer, has taken it upon herself in her own (misguided) fashion to spruce me up. The offer was made to take me for a haircut this weekend. This, folks, is an object lesson in What Not To Do When Trying To Help Neal. See, I couldn't care less about my hair, or much else appearance-related. I am who I am, and I think I do a better job of being who I am than most people do. (Either at being themselves, or at being me. It's a qualification issue.) My polite explanation of why I would be declining her offer went along the lines of, "Anyone who wouldn't pay attention to me the way I look now, but would pay attention to me with some sort of makeover, isn't someone I'd want to have around anyway." And it's not as though I look bad. Really: for all the self-esteem issues I have ever had, that's actually not much of a problem at this time. I look the way I look because I want to, and because I really don't give a toss. My classmate offered, by way of introduction, that as far as she's concerned, my personality and other ephemeral qualities are "perfect", and she thinks I just need to be more presentable or something. And I understand why she says that - it's the way the world is. There are plenty of people out there who succumb to shallow or superficial when they ought to pay closer attention to the person and not the package. But it's all academic (ha ha) anyway, since anyone around here who's caught my eye already will be gone by next month. Timing has apparently become my nemesis over the past couple of years.

* Once classes are over (after the first week of August), I'll be back in Ashland/Huntington to pack up belongings still in storage and schlep them up here to my new apartment. The address is forthcoming - while I now know exactly where I'll be, that information isn't particularly relevant for another couple of weeks, so I'll hold onto it.

* I've discovered a new, unexplored territory within my depression. If I go far enough into it and poke around, there's this one little corner where I just don't want anything at all. I believe the clinical term is anhedonia; while it hasn't been much of a symptom of previous episodes (other than the general dulling of sensation that occurs with cyclo/dysthymia; I typically crave sensation and seek more), this intrigues the purely analytical portion of my brain. It seems to be telling me that the ability to shut off desire for physical sensation could be useful. And I can't argue with it, except to say that since I don't quite know how it works, I would like to know if I could turn it back on again afterwards, since I probably would want to do so (as troublesome as it tends to be).

* "Two more weeks" is the constant mantra around here. I prefer to think, "I only have two more weeks to do everything?"

* The comprehensive exam workshop yesterday was a disaster par excellence. The outgoing and incoming directors of the program were both gone, as was the secretary, so the largely unqualified faculty member in charge of the information session didn't have enough copies of the handout for everyone (nor could he make more - I had to run to the library and make several more on my own dime for people I knew who didn't get it), especially given that we were promised free food (the sure-fire way to get graduate students to do anything) which showed up forty-five minutes late. After the session, while everyone went to chow down, I did my boy scout routine and made the extra handouts; when I returned, most of the food was already gone and people had sectioned off into their own little cliques. There weren't even any chairs left to sit in. I just handed out the papers without saying much and then walked back to my room to have a sandwich. I'm too damn nice for my own good, really. Not to mention the session was an hour-long jazz improvisation on the phrase "everyone's exams are different". Brilliant. I could have stayed home altogether if I'd known how uninformative this information session would be.

That's not a dead horse anymore, it's mulch.

2008-07-21T19:36:41Z

Yeah, I know I'm sounding like a one-note piano.

I am Not Happy.

I am so profoundly Not Happy that I'm not particularly convinced there will be a subsequent time of Happy.

This could very well be chemical, but if life weren't confronting me with things that synchronize with my mood, the chemicals wouldn't have material to work with.

It burns like hygeine!

2008-07-18T15:41:46Z

The latest XKCD strip lands a barbed dart right in my chest. Ow.

Maybe in this afternoon/ maybe we will have to turn and come home soon.

2008-07-10T23:59:00Z

If you're in need of a subject line, you could do worse than pulling a line from a song by Hum.

I'm going to be in Huntington this weekend. The plan is: arrival sometime tomorrow afternoon, spend some time at Danzig Corridor before going to the Atkinson domicile. Saturday, there will be retrieval of materials from storage with the family (and, probably, the inevitable family interaction), but I will be mostly free for food and hanging out and the like. Sunday morning I make the return drive.

Begin emergency preparations now.

Sad situations.

2008-07-07T19:29:56Z

One of my former students was murdered in front of a nightclub over the weekend, apparently.

I remember him. He wasn't a great academic - he was there for football. But he was a nice kid, and that's every bit the tragedy.

DONE.

2008-07-03T19:33:36Z

[pulls a lever]

ENGL 863 British Literature to 1660
ENGL 955 History of Literary Theory

Two down. An entire semester of work complete.

Now on the block:

ENGL 860 Teaching College Literature
ENGL 956 Literary Theory for the Teacher and Scholarly Writer

Ladies and gentlemen, we have movie sign.

2008-07-03T15:08:29Z

http://www.staticmultimedia.com/film/news/shout_factory_at_comic_con

I haven't had this kind of welling-up inside since I saw the words "Sunny Day Real Estate reunite for new CD". Not only is there a 20th anniversary box of DVDs, to be released circa Halloween, but the MST3K crew are going to be reuniting at ComicCon (even Joel and Mike - do you realize how big that is? Probably not...) and they'll even have the puppets and it's being moderated by Patton Oswalt.

If I were to die, that's the heaven that what passes for my soul would go to.

I am a sad, lonely wretch.

2008-07-03T01:20:00Z

Perhaps a better person, in my position at a party with a number of incredibly attractive women, apparently unattached and in my very profession, might have gone up to one of them and made some feeble flailing attempt at conversation. Instead, thanks to my social anxiety and lack of confidence, once the tiny knot of people I knew at the party had to leave, I do so as well.

And this, I think, is how my life is going to be forever.

Soaking and sulking

2008-06-29T23:39:39Z

You know, people wonder where I get my idea of a spiteful god. But when I've spent the entire day watching the rain suddenly pour every time I step out of the building, only to taper off as soon as I get back inside, I can but point to empirical evidence.

I'm immersed now in a project that really doesn't excite me: I am agitated, yes, because I am writing what amounts to a radical manifesto about the irreparable dysfunction of "the university" as we know it, and proposing a sketch of a premise for replacing it. It's hard not to be passionate about how capitalism has ruined education when you've been at the front of the room in public secondary and college education. At the same time, it's disheartening, because I'm writing for a teacher who, for all he has introduced us to these departures in theory and pedagogy, is himself a traditionalist in theory and pedagogy: in short, there's fear I'm going to fail my first core class because I'm being too radical. (I hate to keep using the word, but it's the best one for the task.)

What I'd really like to do is my scholarly annotation of The Sandman, or a reexamination of Shakespeare's sonnet sequence, or something like that. Perhaps there will be opportunities for that, but now things are more complicated. I have so much more to worry about that I'd never seen before. I now have to wonder why the hell I thought I was going to be able to get a job in this broken educational system, and what I thought I would be allowed to do with it if I did get it. It is so remarkably rare to even get a job that allows a reasonable modicum of academic freedom that I have to wonder what Kool-Aid I drank along the line that led me to construct my mental image of my future.

And now I can't because the damn snake made me eat from the tree. (It really is kinda like that - now knowing what I know about the profession, I can't unknow it and go back to putting my head in the sand of a narrow literary specialty and hope to find a comfortable niche in which to spend my career.)

Also, I have had to reset my "X months since my last coffee date that wasn't a date" counter. I do seem to be doing a good job of not getting my hopes up unnecessarily. I'm beginning to wonder something, though... (And this, I admit up front, is going to sound really bizarre and just the sort of thing my hypercaffeinated overworked under-rested brain has cooked up): one of my ex-es (whom I will not name, but those familiar will probably be able to figure it out) claimed that, shortly before I met her, she had 'cast a spell' or something (I forget the actual wording) to bring her a boyfriend. And, voila, I showed up and swept her off her feet. Now, the bad ending to that particular affair leads me to wonder if she might not have turned around and thrown a 'curse' at me or something. It's absurd, but as Rose Walker says in Brief Lives, "I'm not talking about magic. I'm talking about weird shit." And I always did find it weird that her unicorn-glitter-witches-for-dummies stuff seemed to work more often than not. Because if she's hexed me so I haven't had so much as a good date in the past four years, what do I even do about that? Call a Jesuit? Cash in my karma? Ghostbusters?

Feh. I have enough to worry about just this week: one of the retiring faculty is having all the doctoral students over (and just seeing who shows up will be entertainment enough to warrant going), and it's the last week of the first term. Hence my frazzled state: on top of this final paper that isn't going as well as I want, I have a big exam to study for.

Oh, and I read (yesterday?) that I don't have dysthymia. Or, rather, I do - my condition hasn't changed, but the name has been reassigned. Dysthymia is now being used to long-term but mild depression with some severe spikes; what I have (severe spikes of depression in rapid succession punctuating periods of normal moods) is now being referred to as cyclothymia. [rolls eyes] Whatever. The DSM hasn't even been rewritten yet, but mental health jargon changes faster than the weather.

I should probably be talking about what I'm doing, shouldn't I?

2008-06-27T14:48:50Z

First up: anyone - ANYONE - connected in any way to academia needs to go to howtheuniversityworks.com. Read the introduction to Marc Bousquet's book of the same name (available free as a pdf on the main page), and then, if you're not depressed enough, on the page about buying the book from NYU Press, he also has chapter 4 up (also free, also pdf).

My final project for my first core class is turning into a radical manifesto for scrapping the current university system, ingrown with corporate corruption and faulty Western metaphysical assumptions (there are only two choices, one is right, one is wrong, and if you get the form right, the content is not important). I may have to tone it down a bit, but not because I think the professor would mind - going all the way with it would make it way too long for the assignment, and take more time than I have (i.e., this term ends next Thursday).

Not that I haven't thought about dating, but the girls here (while HOT) are all unavailable for one reason or another. Since there's no time or available energy to reach out further than what's right in front of me (the people in the program), I have to content myself with the "look, but don't touch" policy. Which I'm pretty damn good at by now, really. There is one girl... but I shan't let myself get my hopes up; we know what happens every time I do.

One odd thing: my Brit Lit teacher, who was a blast up until recently, brought in some ultra-fundamentalist evangelical propaganda piece to class and showed it to us. It had very little connection to what was going on (though a rationale was weakly tendered), and he asked us for our daily freewrite to respond to it, and not to the actual piece of literature we had discussed earlier. I tore off a four-page salvo debunking much of what was in the tape (and didn't even have time to do the rest - more important work had to be done). So, while I've done stellar in the class up to now, there's now a nagging thought of possibly failing because I didn't agree with it. Let's hope that's just my paranoia.

Strange sleep schedules, stress, and the caffeine that keeps my motor running have me seeing ghost lights, but no migraines (thankfully, knock on wood). Dealing with a migraine would just waste time, and I need every spare moment. In fact, if the opportunity arises, this weekend I may start on books for next term, which starts on the 7th.

I made it through another June 26th, which I was a bit worried about this time, due to the already taxing atmosphere of my life.

I'm trying to take tragical_mirths idea and write a journal: every night, I compose some odd prose poetry about the day. It's terribly cryptic, and not useful to anyone but me, but the writing practice is useful, I guess.

I have my apartment for the fall, also, but I'll forgo posting the address until a more relevant time has arrived.

A snippet I just wrote for a final paper:

2008-06-24T21:47:14Z

"The US Navy reports the unit cost of a Tomahawk (tm) cruise missile at $900,000. Let's take a typical cruise missile strike against civilians, such as the one in May 2008, in Dobley, Somalia, which killed 3 women and 3 children. One could use this example to say that the US thus spends $300,000 per child to drop bombs. Contrast this with the amount the US spends to educate children: New Jersey, the perennial highest spender in the nation, spent $12,981 per pupil, according to the US Census' 2003-4 figures."

A statement:

2008-06-23T21:28:15Z

If I am depressed, it need not have anything at all to do with my classes. I am perfectly capable of being unhappy for personal reasons.

Assessment.

2008-06-20T00:51:12Z

The optometrist flips the little lenses in the big butterfly apparatus, and things come into focus more clearly. (You hope.) In their own way, graduate English department directors do much the same.

Candidacy exams: January 2009
Doctoral exams: probably May 2009

Dissertation possibilities are ALREADY coalescing. Preliminary research has begun to sort out what already exists in the field, whether it will make me marketable as a faculty hire, and if it's even possible. (Both of my instructors, when propositioned with the topic pitch, responded right away with, "Wow, that's a lot of work.")

Adding it up today, I will do in roughly 10 months of classwork what most do in 24. (Assuming I stick to the schedule above.) The ancients believed you could burn away the mortality from someone through immolation and be left with something pure: that is the metaphor of alchemy, after all. And I'm doing it to myself - to see if I can, if nothing else. Perhaps there's some competitiveness in me after all: I'm working harder than I need to in my classes, trying to rampage my way to the doctorate in an absurdly short period of time, because I don't want to be just another name on a register - if I'm going to do this, I'm going to excel at it.

Why? This is MINE, damn it. Whether I succeed or fail is on my own merits alone. Hell, whether or not I live through it is up to nobody but me. I've supported others to their dreams at my own expense, and now I'll be damned if anyone or anything keeps me from it. Not even my own miserable flesh.

Found out today (technically midterm - time has almost become irrelevant) that I have As in all my classes. More specifically, I have only missed one point on all assignments in both my classes combined. But I can't even stop yet to be happy about that: time to knock down the readings for next week I haven't done; time to start on my final project for my core class this term; time to delve back in for more dissertation reconnoiter.

I would say I don't know exactly what's driving me, but that's a lie. I may not know all the reasons, but in those dark moments late at night when I'm really honest with myself, I know what's fueling this intensity. It's not even a good reason, but what matters is that I'll succeed, or burn out utterly in the attempt. I don't do mediocre failures.