This is a strange project to start up again. In the mid-90s I learned basic html and had a webpage on my college server. I was constantly torn between desire for notoriety and the desire for anonymous outlet. Of course, having the page hosted at my college, under my actual name, did not really help for the anonymity -- so perhaps it was the conceit of pretend anonymity that I desired.
I am feeling restless and anxious today. I'm preparing for my departmental exams, which will lead to the ABD status, and the chance to go off to the field to conduct dissertation research. I am currently aiming to finish my PhD within 2.5 years. It is perhaps total fantasy, but the prospect of really being done with school, after 5 consecutive years of graduate school (thus far) is so delicious -- and frightening. Once I take the exams, I'll get to leave mid-sized American city on the east coast that I'm quite sick of. Having grown up in one of the largest American cities on the east coast, living here has been really bloody difficult.
I've been getting quite serious about yoga recently, and I am hoping to use this medium as a chance to reflect on some of my experiences with that. Anonymously, of course. I just took an extended workshop that met once a week -- and for the month and a half of commitment, it proved relatively challenging. What I find even more challenging is sustaining the revelations and insights that I gained during the workshop back out in the world. Yesterday I was charged and energized by the experience. Today I am mopey and tired and achey (we did some unusual exercises in our path toward enlightenment that seemed to have pulled more muscles than I knew I had). I didn't make it to yoga class today, I didn't take the run I thought I would substitute it with, and....sloth sloth sloth. It almost seems like I could write this whole entry on "things I did not do" -- which seems awfully negative and pessimistic. I've been trying to learn not to beat myself up so damn much about things I don't accomplish. It's such a waste of energy, and tomorrow really is another day, so dear god, please shut the fuck up.
The major revelation yesterday, cheesy and trite as it sounds, was to really focus myself on the present moment. I am far too caught up in past slights, deep anxieties about things that have already happened, and vague attachment to some better future not yet now moment (which of course never really comes to pass, as it is always a hypothetical fantasy that never reflects the way things usually progress). In addition, I realized that I live the way I do, in this state of purgatory, because I have chosen it. It feels so easy to get restless (cf. today) as though there were something else I should be doing at any given moment. Something better something different something new something something something.
I tried to remind myself yesterday that what I am doing, when I stop and think about it, is really fucking cool. I love the research project I'm working on -- which took a few years to fully develop (and which I can't disclose here as it would totally give me away and that (not so repressed) vanity of wanting to be the first or at least avant-garde-ish prevents me from talking about it). I'm in the drudge work phase, but it's what needs to be done in order to get into the field and how cool is it that my chosen field includes fieldwork, where I get to travel, see new places, interact with people different from my familiar confines of mid-sized American east coast city (m-s.a.e.c). The whingeing and moaning must stop.
Still, it's been a very intense few years. I don't think I would have ever expected my late twenties to feel so roller-coastery. I really think I'm going through a bit of a protracted adolescent crisis. Yet, the superego that has a tendency to rule my life still feels like it's got a firm grip, which can be exhausting and irritating at the same time.
All this is to say, somewhere in the midst of the above babbling (I have a tendency to be on the loquacious side) is the reason for starting this blog/diary/internal monologue again, ten years after the first time I did this. I have deleted my friendster profiles (twice), refused to join myspace, tribe.net, orkut...etc., and hesitated to join the insane barrage of blogs. But to be perfectly frank, this is here for ME....welcome to the late Aughts, total solipsism, total self-indulgence, total gratification. At least in cyberspace.
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