It's been a while...

Since I made this site and posting the first blog entry. Things have changed!

I've since gotten a job and I am finishing my second year at NWMSU. It's been an educational time itself, as I've adjusted to the new classes, new school, and new student body.

Even more, I've had to adjust to my new self, who and what I am after having completed the degree and set to work doing the job I've been working towards my entire life, or near enough. But at the time of writing, the world is still grappling with the COVID19 pandemic, despite how some people might be acting. Those is capitals and around capitols. I plan to stay scarce as much as I can. Also, I'm writing having had three meetings with graduate students in one day, and the Friday after semester ended at that. It's nice in this part after semester, before summer "really start" to stretch out like a cat on a warm afternoon. Which I am, in a way, having shifted from a tremendously terrible end-half of the semester with the transition to online teaching. It was much better having been done.

However, because of the semester and my own imprudence, I have some scholarship to catch up on, which require effort reminiscent of graduate school coursework. It's funny, thinking back, how much I would produce in a time, but now, having become perhaps more wise and even more experienced, I think about too many considerations to truly let my pen "off the chain," perhaps as I'm doing now. Huh. Perhaps that's it. A writing group I know uses Prompts for the meetings. "A summer in autumn" or "what's something you've always wondered about?" I don't care for prompts, really, but I do need and enjoy the freedom to let it loose, which is perhaps what these blog posts should be. You see, I've been neglecting this poor site, which was set up and left unfinished, something like the facade of ghost towns used for setting in old westerns, but with the summer, and a recently released set of obligations, I've been planning to turn toward myself and my own work as a scholar, thinker, I'm not sure. A professor perhaps? Part of that involves the scholarship I'm needing to tackle, and another involves this forum, which I'm now using to "warm up" my writing muscles, both material and abstract, in preparation for the rigor of the coming writing. It's also nice to live in the head space of scholarship for a while, like my times spent in the worlds of Dungeons & Dragons, but one I get paid for! It's not any more or less complex or engaging for me, and I am an unfortunate sort that thinks all the time, even off the job, so my leisure needs something to be interesting to me in order to be enjoyable. It's an interesting binary, interesting/enjoyable, and like all the others easily deconstructed, or rather shown to have been constructed, from the anti-intellectualism seemingly inherent in American ideology which was rewarded by decades of defunding education. It's this idea that things that are important, like the things learned in school or in books or museums, can't be fun, or that fun has to be had at the expense of seriousness or complexity or challenge. I think for me, if it's too easy, I get bored. Luckily, I've chosen to grapple with the "big questions" and I have the space and time to do so. But I think I also tend to make things not easy for myself, but not to avoid boredom necessarily, but rather thinking that if it's not a struggle then the accomplishment doesn't matter. I came across this quote from the I Ching today, "Resist the temptation to push forward at all costs. Slow down. Recognize all the options and tools that you have to accomplish your intentions." And as I was saying to someone recently my major fault, of many faults, is my impatience, my tendency to hurry, my frustration at my inability to keep pace with the wings of my thought; it's what led me to my position at my age in the discipline I wanted to study. I hurried, but I don't think the destination or the journey was ruined by it. But in hurrying, one rarely actually gets anywhere faster, and risks danger, death, and failure in doing so. A recklessness there is to hurrying. So, in service to not hurrying, I will end here. But, in this inaugural restart to what I hope is an ongoing project, I will continue to allow a structure to emerge. This being a summary of my points: -I'm going to be working on this blog and this site more over the summer

-I'm going to keep it academically focused, in so far as there are discrete, natural categories into which my thought and life can be put (but there is not)

-But I'm going to keep light and playful. A rigorous reflection through a spirit of levity, if not some ferocity thrown in.

-I'm going to write this three times a week (I suppose), and there's going to hopefully be a pithy lesson someone might take, or at least they'd think or be amused for a few minutes. Be well, and don't forget to love each other.