2002-11-07 - 6:22 a.m.
Happy semesters are all alike; every unhappy semester is unhappy in its own way.
Actually, every semester is different from every other, as Hunter once memoriably remarked, and I can't decide whether I'm having a good or bad semester.
The central premise of this entry is that the world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality. Concepts like "semester" name bits and threaten to turn names into things. Only by understanding these names as bundles of relationships, and by placing them back into the field from which they were abstracted, can we hope to avoid misleading inferences and increase our share of understanding.
That said, pull this semester out of the twisted torrent of relationships and it most resembles spring of 2001. That was by far the best semester I ever had at New College; except that everything that reminds me of it are the bad things. Academic work? Forget it. Last week, to cite an extreme case, I missed every class once did absolutely no reading for any of them, save one article I skimmed in class. The paper? Utterly consuming my life. Stress level? Overwelming. Disorganization? Extreme. Sleep? It refuses to come until it seizes me for as long as it desires. Civilization? Playing way too much of it. And on and on.
Yet social anxeity, weirdly enough, is way down, maybe because I only interact with people whenever, whereever, and on whatever terms I desire. Barring the sting of people who come through the house for various movie or magazine related projects, but they don't bother me. General anxiety is way up, though, and my disorganization has reached epidemic levels. I seem incapible of making any apointment, meeting any committment, or even keeping track of any piece of paper. Yet, curiously, my level of depression is down, my seratonin never totally collapsing from levels attained in Annapolis.
Anyway, this week I finally got around to reading this article Professor Vesperi gave me last week: "Making Friends With a Clock: Time Management for Writers." It was hystarical -- that is, hystaricly appropriate -- from the title down.
What most writers, especially journalists, do is binge. They procrastinate for hours, building up a steam of guilt, anger, and rage that ultimitly leads to indifference: "I don't care how bad it is, I've only got 15 minutes left."Then, once they're writing, they are afraid to stop. They write in a fury until deadline or just after... And when it's all done, they're exausted, stressed out, and ready for a drink.
I remember this because in spring of 2001, at about this part of the semester when everything was in a state of chaos and I missed Doenecke's seminar and didn't have a paper for that week, I told him "this semester has been a terrible failure of of time management."
So nothing's changed. On a related note, I am starting to have serious recriminations about my entire Catalyst career. Not regrets, and not related to the current troubles, but rather the realization that I've seriously shortchanged my academics. Doenecke once told me, way back about that time, not to forget that I'm in college to get an education. On my desk now is the 2003 graduation form and I've checked "no," but the feeling of something lost haunts me.
This goes back to beyond any semester or year; but in high school, when I couldn't care less if any of my work was completed, I didn't develop any study skills or time management techniques that I could fall back on now.
Anyway, before disolving the parellels between the semesters -- the particular bundle of relationships and curious alignment of them -- back into the totality of my existence, two aspects demand consideration. The first, drug and alcohol use, seems to be similar but a lot more casual than it was then. The second is that the dominate, overwelming feature of that semester was the presence of the figure of "Sera," who I described in the first ever entry of this diary. The parellel developments in that aspect of my life are too hystarical to discuss.
