Mike is my faculty advisor. He is the one I am suppose to go talk to about school, how I feel, how I am doing, and of course on my “generic abilities” as a developing professional. Mike is also the one responsible for telling me that everyone is aware I sleep in class. The last meeting with Mike didn’t go so well. It was midway through 2nd semester and I had successfully locked away the hell that was Fall Semester 2008 until Mike pried. What has changed? How are things? A barrage of questions I was unsure how to answer or how even to interpret. Fine. Good. Second semester is a lot better. I struggle to string words together. I hate talking to people in a place of authority.
I don’t think he knows where I was, and how Christmas Break served as more of a heart to heart with God keeping me from wanting to drop out. “Well, I just learned to change my expectations,” I said. “How so?” retorts Mike. “Want me to be honest? I lowered them. A lot.” It continued with my attempts to be pretty. Hold it together. Mike is missing the point. I swipe in futile attempts to clear my eyes, prevent snot from dripping out my nose, maintain a normal octave in my speech, get the words past the growing lump of discomfort in my throat. I think it is at this point Mike decides I am emotionally unstable. I think it is at this point I decide it doesn’t matter. It is at this point I am concerned Mike is right.
Today I feel wildly screwed up, constantly resting on the verge of tears. At least looking at books I don’t have to talk to people. Yesterday was worse. Yesterday I had to lie down. Turn on music. Hit repeat. Try to cry. Must be some sick pre-menstrual hormonal kick. Monday I was so happy. I am still scanning the General Reading section. It’s so small.
A little white book with lots of words sprawling from its top corner catches my eye. Its one of those sickening inspirational books, but I can’t leave it alone because David Foster Wallace’s name is on it. His name a different color - probably red amidst the black type. This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. I stood there and read the whole book, set up like a page-a-day inspirational skit.
First of all, anyone who read the book would tell you the title is a terrible one. Ironic to a point, because Wallace clearly makes the point in the speech (originally given as a commencement speech at Kenyon College, Ohio) that it is not some moral diatribe on how we ought to live, but in the way Wallace would put it, “It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.”
Second I think Wallace would be pissed if he found out they were selling his words like that. The way they packaged it. Bullshit he’d say. Find it online, here is the link. (Which I did, so don’t waste your money on the feel good classic: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/20/fiction) I also came home and checked the publication date: April 2009. No wonder. They can do that now cause he’s the dead guy. The irony.
Wallace starts with this idea of the claim that a liberal arts education teaches one ‘how to think.’ He admits, like so few do, that the world is in essence a self-centered one, of which I agree. It is physiologically impossible for it not to be, because everything is seen through the lens of self, filtered by yourself, in extension of yourself. The closest way to exit this caged existence is to be aware of this reality. Enter the wise sage off-handed comment of John Bennion and my most oft quote from some one of his college lit classes. “True charity is the ability to see others as something other than an extension of the self.” This concept of the self-centered universe is pervasive; we are who we are, period. Therefore our control to change lies in our ability to see clearly and choose what we consider our substance. In Wallace’s essay I would postulate that he would believe you are what you choose to think about.
Just consider this excerpt:
“Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat-out won't want to. But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line - maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible - it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important - if you want to operate on your default setting - then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.”I love that there are certain things we get hung up on. Especially writers. This “what we worship” soapbox has turned up before. I wrote about it.
So what now. I have the whole day. No conference with Mike. No hike as was planned. No moral gusto to go volunteer. I would feel guilty volunteering anyway. If I went I know I would end up thinking I was so much better than the other volunteers there. They are just here to get their hours done in one day, just to get it over with. I know I would think that. I need to go home. I need to find a way to kill the rot that is decaying me from the inside out. I need to find out why I think it is someone else’s fault that my moral goodness it being snuffed out. Extinguished.
My bike ride home I think of that Kenna video Hellbent. Somehow it is a gross similarity to how I feel at school right now. I get sick thinking that my ability to create is dead. I get sick thinking about how I just earned my worst grade in PT school thus far on our last exam. I am scared that what I really feel is apathy. Damn it, I hate it when people tell me I care too much. How can you care too much!? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owS1coeoWEc
Can we talk about the external Jarivk Heart yet; back on page 142-144 where the woman can carry her prosthetic heart in a purse? 3 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U
“The 46-year-old recipient of the Jarvik IX Exterior Artifical Heart was actively window shopping in Cambridge, Massachusetts’ fashionable Harvard Square when a transvestite purse snatcher, a drug addict with a criminal record all too well known to public officials, bizarrely outfitted in a strapless cocktail dress, spike heels, tattered feather boa, and auburn wig, brutally tore the life sustaining purse from the woman’s unwitting grasp.I just think about this a lot, may or may not have inserted it awkwardly into a few conversations. It’s embedded in a really great chapter too. Ironic.
“The active, alert woman gave chase to the purse snatching ‘woman’ for as long as she could, plaintively shouting to passers by the words, ‘Stop her! She stole my heart!’ on the fashionable sidewalk crowded with shoppers, reportedly shouting repeatedly, ‘She stole my heart, stop her!” In response to her plaintive calls, tragically, misunderstanding shoppers and passers by merely shook their heads at one another, smiling knowingly at what they ignorantly presumed to be yet another alternative lifestyle’s relationship gone sour. A duo of Cambridge, Massachusetts, patrolmen, whose names are being withheld from the Moment’s dogged queries, were publicly heard to passively quip, ‘Happens all the time,’ as the victimized woman staggered frantically past in the wake of the fleet transvestite, shouting for help for her stolen heart.”
Anyway, maybe I’ll just pretend I am graduating with parting words from DFW:
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”I love that he uses the word unsexy.
