Time to quit

This post has been a long time coming, so long a time it went back to even before I had this blog, or indeed, even before there was high-speed internet. Because this post will be about why I got drawn to philosophy when I was in first year college (in 1999). And I also suspect that this post is about love. I also suspect that the way I love is the way I deal with philosophy, which is by implication the way philosophy (if it were a mistress) deals with me, all of which contribute to the fact that I'm single. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I also suspect that I will always do that, like what I did six words ago.

To begin. I didn't choose philosophy as my major when I signed up for university. Like most high school students, I had no idea what I would like to grow up as: the practical question of what I wanted to spend my entire life building a career around isn't real, or isn't as real as... Hmm, give me a moment to say what is categorically real during high school. (Bullies? Or that bunch of entitled brats you had as your schoolmates, who brag about daddy's money but could never for the life of them manage to bring one sheet of intermediate pad of their own in the entire time they were in high school?) Anyway. To most high school students, or at least this was the case during my time, or at least this was just my case and I'm merely projecting in self-defense, college is both solid and vague. Solid, because chances are you're going to a different place or campus and the move weighs heavily against the comfort you never knew your old campus gave you, bullies be damned; and vague, because you only heard about college from your parents, and during the useless orientation your high school guidance council office organized. Yes, you know you had to go to college, otherwise you'd end up nearly unemployable (or at least unemployable in those jobs that have purported dignity). College is What Is Done after high school, that line delivered with those same capitals. But the concrete what and why, you yourself, as in you at that time, had to do it, isn't fixed vividly in your mind, at that time. Again, this might just be me. So you (or only I) end up both romanticizing college and having no goddamned clue as to how it is really important. It's important for employability, indeed, but its importance only strikes you when you're already years into your future, in a career - whether your university education was or was not relevant is irrelevant. College is important: it determines, in one way or another, its own relevance to your future. If it is relevant (i.e., you studied BS Biology and you ended up in a bio lab), then it's relevant. But even when it is irrelevant, that is how its relevance is: wasted time, wasted content - just a diploma and a bunch of letters after your name, bunch of friends made, maybe even where you met this dork who will turn out to be your husband in six, seven years. It's something you will always look back to, either with more regret or more appreciation, depending on the time of the day, and depending on how much alcohol you have in you. It's a lot like love, that way. But, again, I'm getting ahead of myself.

So, to begin again. I didn't choose philosophy as my major when I started out - I originally signed up for AB Mass Communications, for the very stupid reason that I want to be doing what I thought journalism, or at least advertising, was. Look at that previous sentence: that ought to tell you how vague college and majors is to my head, and how much my high school orientation of college sucked, and how much I cared about what my life would be like (which should in turn tell you about what I think I thought about life, and caring, and time). I am inclined to defend this apathy now with a nonchalant bravado (which all bravado should be. If it were blatant then it would be desperation), saying that I didn't care enough because I know I will make it wherever I end up in. And then I would temper that arrogance which does not nearly enough show with a cyclical (i.e., fallacious) argument: wherever I end up in, I would survive, because I didn't care. And then I would add a smaller bravado to that: I can do whatever will be required in whatever. Maybe not well, but I can do it. (In fact, I pulled that same argument here and more subtly here.)  This is one of the arguments of the passionless. (Another one is "fuck it all," which is, I admit, not an argument, but a rather useless incitement to one).

That attitude made me enroll in AB Communications, and made me stick to it for one year. It was only one year into that major (which didn't have specializations) when I realized that it didn't have specializations in the university that I was in (which again should tell you how greatly I cared). So that meant that by sophomore year I would be required to write journalism pieces, by junior year I would be required to cover,  à la budding reporter in budding news channel complete with budding cameraman and a spit-filled mic, a fake emergency in this national road (if it were an earthquake maybe I would have to do some side-by-side bodily movements and wide-eyed, breaths-caught-in-throat effects while fake reporting). And by senior year I would be required to do editing and filmography or whatever it is they do at studios. (I learned all this through my seatmate in first year, by the way, who was a senior still taking up her General Education units, and who looked like hell after pulling two all-nighters in a row, because of the editing shit she did.) At around the same week my seatmate on the other side, who was a philosophy major (he came from a major seminary in the province) asked what Descartes meant in one of his readings which he held to my face. So I told him what I think Descartes meant, and asked him (my seatmate, not Descartes) why he had to ask me and for what, and there you have it - I suddenly hated AB Mass Comm (plus, I got my first ever line of 7 grade in Comm 1 - which may not be a "plus," but the reason altogether), and found that AB Philosophy is actually a goddamned major in this university. So I shifted come second year first semester. That is a literal account: there is no depth or metaphorical element to that decision.

So here I am, resigning from almost a dozen years of teaching philosophy. That's where I ended up in, and I realized I am not good at it. After college graduation I applied for a teaching position in that same university, and taught while taking up my Master's, in that same university still, simultaneously. Nearing the time of the completion of my MA, I applied and got accepted to another university. Six years into that I applied for a PhD in yet another university, and ended up teaching for two years there. What made me stick so long in philosophy is that I thought I was good at teaching it - I am wordy. I teach the way I write (complete with parts like this), and I give enough sound bytes to be quotable. It turns out I churn out sound bytes and only sound bytes, which good philosophy should never (only) be. When it comes to academic writing, I am like a vacuum cleaner: I suck, and I am full of dirt. I lack the discipline to write properly (at least what "properly" means in philosophical writing). Even in philosophical thinking, I am like a vacuum cleaner, only industrial grade: I suck big time, and it turns out that I really am an appliance for cleaning carpets. Throughout this time, another revelation surfaces: if I am not immediately excellent at something, I will resent it (the "it" refers to the something as well as my incompetence) and I will resent myself, so I will quit. It took me a dozen years to realize I am not immediately good at philosophizing. I can memorize names and philosophical systems, I can be technical when it comes down to it, but I will never have the skill required to sustain it (the "it" still referring to the something as well as my competence). (Or maybe I can pull another bulllshit argument here and say I only appreciate philosophy if I can turn it into literature, which again should tell you how much I care about even defining philosophy or literature.) So I will quit, because I'm not (immediately) good at it, and because my god complex will resent myself for not being that, undulating between reasons of bravado, false modesty, and just sheer passionlessness masking as apathy masked as coolness. That is how you fuck up your life. That is how you fuck up love. Because it might not be about being good at something, it's about staying long enough, having had the chance to stay, being given chances to stay, and you just continually fucking things up based on whatever standard suits the moment, or you just being you when all the while you're clueless as to how to even begin defining you.

Every single thing that made me go through and quit every single thing in philosophy is applicable to love. My college professor once said, "Philosophy is a cruel mistress," I think within the context of his singlehood. He's right, though not perhaps for the reason he espoused when he said it: applied to me, philosophy is a cruel mistress because she doesn't love me, and I don't love her, while defining me all the while we were together. In all my relationships I overthink when I should just stop and just goddamned experience, overthinking being a characteristic of philosophers, and stopping and letting be being a characteristic of philosophers also. In them I get ahead of myself, which philosophy should always be doing, for it will be useless without a handhold on possibility. In them I am disappointed at myself and the world, which philosophers are, if anything, that's why they philosophize to begin with. In them nothing stays, for all the reasons, for none of the reasons, for all the reasons combined, for none of the reasons even when combined.

And I am quitting it, but it won't quit me, and yet it doesn't love me. For it cannot love: it has to understand. When philosophy loves, it stops being itself. That is why it's named philosophy to begin with: philosophy is the love of wisdom, and wisdom is never whole, complete, or ever done. That is, after all, what makes it wisdom.

That's my sound byte. Time to quit.

And perhaps be a toaster. Or a washing machine.