Monday, August 1, 2011

Externalization. Restless, Autonomous Externalization.

August has officially begun and I am unofficially restless.

Being in Maine seeing my family was a really nice time. I enjoyed seeing everyone. And my first two days back in Seattle have been super nice and filled with friends and nice weather and lots of fun.

But my life has been on hiatus for a week and now I'm back in the thick of it without being in the thickest of it.

Tomorrow (today) I'll be going back to work. Work is fun for me. But I'm not sure how I'm feeling about it these days. Work is such a weird part of life and I don't know what to do with myself.

And I don't know exactly what to do about my reading and writing. Which is the normal thing it seems. But right now I'm in a weird spot where I have an outline, sorta, and a bunch of stuff I could write about. But I feel more inclined to wait and keep reading. I just don't know what to read.

I was trying to read Deleuze's Difference & Repetition but the first 40 pages felt so impossible and I'm not sure if I can really push my way through it or not. So difficult. It amazes me sometimes how difficult a book can be. And jesus this book is one of those books.

I started looking at a volume of essays called The Humanities And The Dynamics Of Inclusion Since World War II. Should be good to look at. It is pretty important that I understand the state of the humanities before I commit to graduate school and get all wrapped up in that world. Just started reading the intro. I'll finish the intro and maybe test the waters with 1 of the essays.

I was thinking about this blog. Sometimes it just seems so odd to me. Like what is going on here. Why am I doing this? What is all this writing about? Why am I putting it on the internet?

And it occurred to me that even though this blog is very public (in theory), I feel very disconnected from it. This blog is autonomous or something. It is autonomous from me. Separate from me. Maybe autonomous isn't the best word to use. I'm not sure what word to use.

But when I externalize things, when I make words and I put them on the internet, I don't always feels super connected to them. I wonder about them and their relationship to me and my life. Because sometimes I don't feel like a writer. I feel like a lot of other things. I might not be a writer (even though I have done quite a lot of writing). I'm not sure what I am.

But there is something weird about this blog, something weird about writing, something weird about my sense of identity.

Honestly, I feel that my identity is solidified a lot more in my relationships with other people than it is by my writing. My writing is definitely an important part of my identity. But I have a better sense of myself from my relationships with other people. That is the real me, I think. But the writing is me too.

One interesting thing is how my writing effects my relationships. Because it definitely does. In my more philosophical writing I am typically addressing some sort of issue that has implications for the (my) social world. I'm usually writing about things like small talk, expression, minds, empathy, emotions, language, and so on. All of that writing then effects how I engage with people in the real world.

So it is an interesting question about this blog, its autonomy, its relationship to my social life.

Who knows.

All I know is that things are going to be fine. But that I'm restless right now.

I'm restless for the journey ahead.

Which means that I'm uncomfortable with waiting.

Which is something I don't like.

Waiting is important. And I'd like to be better at it.

Who knows. I want to get to my writing at some point.

I'm working on problems that roughly fall into the category of philosophy of history.

Wonderful.

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