Friday Afternoon Confesional: I’m a quitter

I mean, I was planning to write this on Friday but I felt a bit off and wound up watching the tennis. Tennis is such an unimaginative sport: the same people win in the same way all of the time. I vaguely remember that some 30 years ago there were occasional outbursts that seemed to indicate this was a sport of man rather than machine. Now, only one thing is for sure: successful tennis players are no quitters. Whatever, I watched it feeling every ounce of energy being drawn from me, knowing full well I should have followed through with my plan but still giving into the fascination for nothingness which is my true addiction.

In other words: I’m a quitter.

I would normally not feel inclined to see this as a confession were it not for the blatant fact that quitting is, societally, seen as the pinnacle of anti-social behavior. Perseverance, now that is something we should all have. Whether it is the passionate entrepreneur who, after 300 pitches says to herself “I just have to change this and try harder” or the artist who has eaten dirt for decades without faltering in his single-focused follies, it is the transpiration that is admired. The patient exercise of impatience to keep on going on because the reward is worth the effort of clinging on even if is  uncut misery topped with pure humiliation.

The quitter’s take: I’m rich enough to behave spoiled, so let that be my quiet rebellion.

Friday Afternoon Confessional: squatting

Somebody asked me what I was doing here.

I gave that somebody an answer but confess I don’t feel I got an answer myself. Sure, I am here. Yes, I am doing something. But what am I doing here?

Squatting, I guess.

Or maybe writing an interminable list of suicide letters. If I keep on doing this, like many a writer did, it’s the surest thing to keep me alive for a while.

But isn’t that squatting as well?

Friday Afternoon Confessional: I’m not an undertaker.

It is crucial, or so we are told, that we undertake things. In English, such undertaking can earn you the title of entrepreneur. It’s such a tongue-twistingly ugly word that it’s reserved for the successful few. Anybody can be an undertaker, but entrepreneurs, real entrepreneurs, are few and far between. It’s, by the way, characteristic of ugly nouns for ugly elite concepts to attract ‘real’ as adjective and contaminate it with the need for italicization. I confess I’m annoyed with the concept (which says little because I equally confess that I’m annoyed at being annoyed).

In my native Dutch language, the noun corresponding to ‘to undertake’ is not taken by the specific undertaking which is to take dead people to their underground destination. So we’re all supposed to undertake, ondernemen, and become true undertakers, ondernemers (for ‘true’, see ‘real’ above). As is adequately demonstrated by the time it takes me to come to the point, I ain’t no undertaker. Oddly enough this is also supported by the fact that the only corpse I plan to be associated with is my own whilst – in proverbial Dutch and The Apprentice – entrepreneurs have to handle corpses with the same ease as undertakers do.

Which brings me to why I’m no undertaker.

Friday Afternoon Confessional: sick of being ill

I confess that against my (and the doctor’s) better judgment, I went out for work yesterday. The result was that I achieved nothing significant and extended my illness over the week-end. So now I am alone and, for the first time in many months, writing to the few who happen to wander into this page.

Hello! You’re not the only ones to feel fucked over by the present life!

I confess making that remark mainly to get your attention. Not that I particularly want it, but it seems to be the honest thing to do. I at least have to try to get your attention. I’m not in fact fucked over. Far from it. It often feels that way just because I’m unable to cope with the absence of real bad luck in my life.

Let’s just all confess to it: we try too much. The drive for success is like a butt plug making us feel uneasy all of the time. Not that I know how a butt plug feels like; as I told you, I’m not in fact fucked over. Still, there’s an anal metaphor here. Society drills us to want to pick up the soap and the only break-through that is ever achieved that way … I’ll definitely say more.

Friday Afternoon Confessional: Finnegan’s Slumber

If there’s an -ist that applies to me it’s pensivist. Maybe I should go cold turkey on thinking. I confess that the strategy of doing it moderately doesn’t feel like the winning strategy. And what is a strategy if it is not winning. Isn’t it all about winning? It is. It is. It is. Therefore I am. Whether I like it or not. Nobody asked me. Except myself. Precisely nobody, that is.

I’m reading Finnegans Wake. I confess to ambivalence about it. It’s great but makes me feel little. What is the point?, is that the point? It is a snake; it is; it is; it is. But I was bitten long before. Now I’m just rattled. Ha. The beauty of it is: it is self-contained. I read it without trying to understand.

But let me think about the eternal recurrence of the eternal recurrence. I hate it but confess to loving those who seem to love it, or, at least, who love those who love those who seem to love it. The thing is that those who seem to love it are those who break the cycle and, methinks, Finnegans Wake breaks the cycle.

Thus –>

Friday Afternoon Confessional: on ‘that’

I confess I feel somewhat different. I further confess that I am different from people who are really different in not being really – perceptibly – different. If I would do my life over, I would not be be bothered to do anything different except what I will do from now onwards. What I did was all fine; what I’m going to do just doesn’t cut it. I confess I’ll continue to live in the future where I know the right thing to do is to live in the past.

It’s complicated.

What I’m going to do is to think about writing a treatise on the word ‘that’. What I’m not going to do is just that. I confess that I admire this thing called language. Mainly because it isn’t anyone’s to call ‘That’s mine!’ (or ‘ours’ for that matter because ‘ours’ is the chicken shit way of saying ‘mine’).

Language starts with ‘that’. That’s what I think at least and I confess I’d like to convince you of it.

Friday Afternoon Confessional: Hello Again!

I confess I made some decisions in the past year which seemed – to me – pretty heroic. Maybe they were the reason why I followed with interest the discovery of Miguel de Cervantes’ remains. I left a highly paid job to chase a – maybe forever – unpaid dream. I further confess that, 9 months into the chase, I’m left wondering whether I’m up to it. It’s not about the money: I have a beautiful wife which brings in the dough and, after 22 years of loyal service, I negotiated a fine settlement which bought me 2 years of relative safety.

I confess it’s entirely about (not) being needed.

I realized I wasn’t blogging anymore, a practice I maintained for years regardless of time pressure. I hate being busy. I confess I felt busy for 9 months without ‘having’ to do anything. So, Puck Ip!, here I go again.

So the guy asks: “Why do you speak of this grand vision of changing the education system?”

Damn, why indeed?

Friday Afternoon Confessional: the fallacy of conservatism

This is the fallacy:

“If this tradition was good for the parents then it will be good for the kids as well.”

There’s not a lot more to conservatism and – as much hatred this fallacy deserves – it is also by far the best conservatism has to offer. Because, at least, it looks like it might make sense as some kid of a default rule. “Why change something that isn’t broken?”, is the most offered conservative response to, well, anything. And it should give pause (including the middle and all that) because what we share is valuable because it is what binds us. It should not be changed just because somebody feels like it, that’s dictatorial. The fact is that change is the one tradition that binds every single culture together. So, in conserving, conservatism degenerates so quickly in dictatorial behavior precisely because conservatism strives to abolish the very change that makes us uniquely capable to cope with the unexpected. It’s no coincidence that the outer edges of conservatism are plagued with convictions such as creationism. As it isn’t coincidence that the outer edges of revolutionary progressives are plagued with totalitarians. And that the next generations of those revolutionary people quickly converge to conserve (showing how evolutionarily stable conservatism is).

So I confess to not merely hating conservatism.

Still, it is a fallacy so let’s inspect in some detail the fallacy of conservative conflation:

Friday Afternoon Confessional: back on track or backtrack?

I confess some things should be as they were. Traditions provide comfort. I confess that this confession is provoked by a day struggling to be – I think this is a sufficiently universal term for it – independent. After today it strikes me that being (an?) independent involves being dependent, a lot, on the ability to chase practical and administrative things.

Gathering all of my courage (and a bunch of paperwork prepared by my accountant) I traveled  to the court. Well, the office of the clerk of some court. The building was the same as the one in which criminals are convicted. The people were nice. I handed over the paperwork expecting this or that stamp as a permanent testimony of me having faced the administrative music. Fat chance. A nice lady told me that my nice accountant – whom I hold no grudge – forgot a not so unimportant detail: to establish a partnership there has to be more than one partner.

Now I need to ask my partner to become my partner, my accountant to adapt the paperwork such that my partner is described as my partner & return to the court’s clerks to stamp me and my partner into partner-hood. If my partner in life is allowed by her boss to become my partner in business.

I confess after that doing the grocery shopping felt like the pinnacle of efficiency and effectivity combined (I see that the word “effectivity” gets a red wavy underlining from wordpress thesaurus. WordPress thesaurus should definitely be mandatory in corporate circles).

To remain on the topic of dependency, I further confess I’m on twitter now.

Friday Afternoon Confessional: Reading List

I confess I put my life on hold for the last 12 months chasing a ghost. It took me more than a month just to start to remember how life was. Was it worth it? I confess I have no idea. Am I done chasing ghosts? I confess my best answer is: time will tell.

The piles of books which have amassed to the left and right of me do suggest I kept on reading though. I confess I want to boast about that.

To my left, pile n°1: Kripke, Naming & Necessity; Bolaño, Amberes, El Tercer Reich & Estrella Distante; Zweig, Schachnovelle.

Across older piles lying open on pp. 150-151 for reasons I confess I forgot entirely: Gadamar, Elogio de la teoría. Which brings me to the piles to my right featuring more Gadamer, On Education, Poetry And History as well as Wer bin Ich und wer bist Du. The latter sits on top of Fitch, Saul Kripke and Peinado, Futbolistas de izquierdas. Further down in that pile: Gass, Middle C and the almost most recent one: Piketty, Le capital au XXIe siècle.

To my left, pile n° 2: Jaeger, Paideia: los ideales de la cultura griega & Aristoteles; Grundlegung einer Geschichte seiner Entwicklung.

I confess all this name dropping leaves me feeling I really have something to confess about. I am unsure however whether it is arrogance or lack of reading quality/quantity (certainly as far as fiction goes). In order not to have to dwell on that issue I’ll just mention what I’m reading now (& only talk about that one below the fold): Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good for You. As you can tell from the Capital letters in the title I’m turning to vulgarized science from time to time (I blame Dawkins for that) but I’m not addicted to it, yet (I might add now I’m at it that I quit smoking if, I confess, without quitting nicotine given I just have put an “e-” before my cigarettes).

I confess it was not my plan to write that many words before I got to this pink book by (the maybe venerable) Steven Johnson and the Flynn effect.