3 Sep 2010
Let’s talk a bit about the grammar of the self, shall we?
As a(n assistant) language teacher, you spend a lot more time thinking about grammar than most people. Clauses and tenses are less automatic.
I realized just now that, barring narrative or a lower-level English student, there is only one tense that is really appropriate for talking about oneself: the present continuous. There is only one voice: active. There is only one mood: indicative.
To speak of a time other than the present, even in the first person, is to speak of someone else. The self, the self now (or now, or now, or now…) is only in the present. The past is who you were (or, more likely, who you want to have been). The future is who you might be. They are different people. Every moment you are destroyed and recreated (it’s not impossible to step into the same river twice because the river is different; it’s impossible because you are different). The past is another country, and another person lives(/d) there. (Really, really, even if the rest of this doesn’t make sense to you, or you disregard it: think of a foolish thing you’ve done out of ignorance. Would you do it again? The same person would, but you are a different person, who learned from that experience, and you know better.) Now, now is when are doing the thing that makes you you. Now is when you are choosing.
And only the continuous will do. You don’t live. Either you are living, or you are not living. I don’t write (really, I don’t), but I am writing. I am studying Japanese. I am learning to teach English. I am scratching my head. Either it’s happening now, or it’s not happening. Now matters. Now always matters. Now is when it is all happening.
Or, rather, now is when I am happening. I imagine Nietzsche as a grammarian would have been very against the passive voice, and Sartre too. The passive voice lets in words like someone, puts objects in the place of people, pretends there are actions without actors. To say “something is happening to me” is to deny (for a sentence, for a moment, now) your culpability for what you are doing, to retreat from the responsibility that is choosing, is doing, is being.
And that responsibility means there can be no question, no what-if, no I’d-rather. There can be no command (at, least, no command can be accepted; and how could you command when you couldn’t obey?).
To say “I am this thing” or “I am this adjective”, “I do this thing” is to lie, to tell a story about a permanent self that does not exist, a self of attributes, of habits, of definitions. But the only real self is the self now, the self who is reading, who is breathing, who is … what?
The self is doing, or the self will not do.
Filed by shaun at September 3rd, 2010 under indifferenthonest
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17 Jul 2010
New ALTs (Assistant Language Teacher; me) are coming. If this were only a canyon instead of a basin, I’d have a great Mamas & Papas quote for a title (they are all young girls). This meant my (self-imposed) duty was to e-mail and brief them on the area. It was a bit of a challenge for me. As most of you know, I’m kind of a negative son of a bitch, and I worked hard to curb my negativity to give an honest and balanced view of the area (I’m still working hard on this all the time, actually). To convey how little the bad things really matter to me (bad things are inherently more interesting than good, and are usually weighted accordingly in description and conversation).
There’s a lot of things that are less than ideal about the place (which, I increasingly realize, makes it like the rest of life). It’s important to acquaint new people with these things in time, though, to give them the chance to back out, since some really can’t take it here, and the sooner everyone knows that, the better. The negatives came pretty easy to me, but putting them in context, giving equally proportionate time to the positives, didn’t.
I do love it here. Yesterday I was driving on a ridiculously narrow road in a valley between two rice paddies when a pheasant ran across the road in front of me. I’ve never seen a wild pheasant before. I tapped the brakes and said to myself what has become my near-daily refrain:
I fucking love this place.
I was at a party tonight. We were standing by the river (the bathroom was full), and talking about the stars. They’re visible here. A partly-cloudy night here is like the clearest night I ever saw near a city in the US. I don’t know if it’s the mountains, or just weather patterns, or a deity I don’t believe in blessing the place, but any night you want to wander out of your apartment you can see stars, even in the glare of the streetlights.
Talking with one of the ALTs who is leaving soon, we discussed those mountains, the rice fields, the Japanese people. How shocking it will be to go back to life without them. I don’t think I can do it. The ALTs leaving has me thinking, and every day I think about it, I can’t imagine life without the mountains. The sky, somehow bigger for the boundaries they provide. The contrast of the green in the summer, the stencil of snow cover against grey skies in the winter (and the snowboarding).
The end of my email: “most days I am still thrilled and amazed that someone pays me to live here and have this much fun.” I wish you could scrape together the two grand to visit, or at least send the boy. I know you’d like it here, and I’ve got an extra futon.
It’s an ironic mode, apparently, but litotes is sometimes the best I can do: I’ve never been happier. (Someone’s making plans to stay?)
Filed by shaun at July 17th, 2010 under indifferenthonest
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23 May 2010
I’m happy, very happy almost all the time now, because I honestly love teaching, and I live in a gorgeous and interesting place, and materially am pretty comfortable. But even with all this happiness (most of the time I drive home from work just amazed at how great my day was, even on the relatively shitty days), I’m still feeling listless. The happier I am with what I’m doing, the worse it gets, really, because I realize that (even though I knew I wanted to teach when I was, like, eight) I am here essentially through dumb luck. I stumbled on the JET program at the right moment to apply, when I was fed up with my miserable cubicle job and had one of my infrequent bursts of directable energy. For once I didn’t hit a hard patch and dither till the deadline passed. I am unlikely to be this lucky again. And if I am finally figuring out what I like, and if the last time I tried it worked so well, if I’m going to live up to my you-do-it-to-yourself personal philosophy, I have to, I really, really have to, sit down and do some thinking. I have to get a plan. Not an inflexible, day-planner plan, but a direction, a goal. Just on the weekdays, between getting home from work and going to bed I’ve got more than seven hours a day. There has to be a way to put that time to better use than rewatching old TV or rereading old books.
The seventh season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is essentially pointless. The villain sucks, the character development is flat or too dramatically bent, and the climax is a bit anti-. (They probably should have stopped after five and done “Once More with Feeling” as a special.) Even the episode I like most is a bit annoying, because it’s about Andrew, who is more than just a bit annoying, but when you watch it at the right time, when you’ve got that listless feeling and you don’t know why, it can be a good reminder of something you keep forgetting.
You see, diary, there’s a difference between story-telling and thinking. Many times in my life, I’ve thought that I think too much and act too little. But the truth is that I think almost not at all, and what I called thinking on those occasions was not thinking, but narrating.
I used to run all these internal comparisons to Hamlet. Our family situations are a bit different, but I could really relate to his paralyzing ruminations. I thought we were both thinking too much to have time or energy to act, but the truth is that Hamlet is too busy telling himself (ghost) stories about his life to live it. This is a good way to make your life seem more sensible, if your mom is dating your uncle, or less boring, if you never actually do anything, but it’s all just storytelling. I don’t do much of that anymore (you may have noticed), but unfortunately I haven’t been doing much thinking either. The truth is, I’m a bit shallow and not all that smart. I quip pretty well and read a lot, so I often fool people (especially myself) into thinking I’m a lot brighter and deeper than I really am. I need to think more (and better). I need to get working on that self-awareness thing on a level beyond telling stories about myself to myself. I need to feel listless less and do more. I need to quit forgetting all of this all the time.
Maybe that’s why I’m putting this here, as a public reminder to myself. Maybe it’s more of the narrating I mean to be avoiding, maybe not. Maybe I just feel like it, and that’s enough reason.
Filed by shaun at May 23rd, 2010 under indifferenthonest
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30 Sep 2009
13 days left to go, and about one suitcase-worth of extra stuff to squeeze in somewhere. The baggage allowance is two bags of 50lbs each plus the carryon and personal item, and international shipping is insanely expensive for anything larger than small parcels. While harsh evaluation along the lines of whether any ceramic skull candy dish, no matter how bright and festive, is worth transporting across the Pacific Ocean, has culled my worldly possessions down to slightly less than 100 pounds, the volume of said possessions still exceeds the interior dimensions of my luggage.
In related news, I now have less than two dozen books (books, you may know, are heavy). Anyone who has seen any of my apartments should have some idea what that entailed–about a dozen trips to Half-Price, net result: -4000 books +400 USD (estimated).
So now there is the nightly revacuuming of plastic bags full of clothes and shuffling things between various bags as though this will somehow create a fold in spacetime that will let me get my second-favorite coat or another pair of boots onto the plane.
Oh, but I bet you wanted to know why I’m going, not just details about suitcases.
Filed by shaun at September 30th, 2009 under indifferenthonest
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4 Sep 2009
I’m moving to Japan next month.
Filed by shaun at September 4th, 2009 under indifferenthonest
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3 Sep 2009
Daniel N Robinson, at the end of a lecture about psychology and the witch hunts in early modern Europe:
What is the moral tale that I hope to have conveyed with this story about minds possessed?
First, theories come quite easily to us when we seek to explain the aberrant or eccentric behavior of others. Secondly, we tend to describe those who are different from ourselves not in the neutral terms of merely different but in the evaluative terms of sick, diseased, sinful. Thirdly, sometimes in our solicitude we take out after those to cure them of diseases that exist only in our theories, and not in them. Fourthly, as reasonable and judicious people, when we set out to do this we want to be sure that we’re using the right kind of method, that we have the right kind of data, that indeed–if there’s something actually juridical or adjudicative going on–that we even have settled and defensible trial procedures.
I’ve rehearsed the witch panic for you–I shouldn’t call it a panic; it went on for over three centuries–to say that all these consideration were operative at the time, that the motives by and large were probably salutary and even laudable motives, and that the conduct was deplorable, the victims numerous and savaged, the complacency enduring for the better part of three hundred years.
The moral tale is: once you’re absolutely sure what makes Smith tick, you know everything about him you would care to know, look in the mirror and say three times, “I may be wrong, I may be very wrong, I may be hopelessly wrong”, and you’ll probably be right.
Filed by shaun at September 3rd, 2009 under indifferenthonest
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5 Jul 2009
It’s still here, I guess.
Filed by shaun at July 5th, 2009 under indifferenthonest
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10 Dec 2008
I owe you an apology, Houston. I said some things, some, well, I don’t think they were untrue things, exactly, but very unkind, definitely more than you deserved (after all, it’s not like you’re anywhere near as bad as Dallas). I stand by a lot of what I said–you’ve got problems, especially that sprawl thing–but I don’t think, now, more than most places, and you’ve got a lot of good too. The further away from you I get, the more I appreciate the good, and the more obvious it gets that what really bothered me had a lot more to do with my flaws than yours. So all that stuff I said, let’s just chalk it up to projection and me being an asshole again, ok?
Filed by shaun at December 10th, 2008 under indifferenthonest
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