It's the greatest thing that's yet to have happened

I have been trying to repay the karmic debt I incurred at jury duty this last week. Obviously, I needed to get out of it, but something about the way I handled it bothered me. It shouldn't have, being that the whole governmental institution is problematic, but I should because I know that people like me should be involved in the "process" so that it is not perpetually run by the idiots of the world. That's my optimistic perspective at any rate, egomaniacal as it sounds (or is). So yesterday I let the person with only a salad go in front of me at Whole Foods instead of making him wait in line. Then I wished him a great day after he said thanks. I'm trying.

There has been some odd epiphany of late that is worth noting here. I have been troubled with the impending return to DU and with the state of my scholarship in this regard (or complete lack thereof), and when I ran into a colleague two days ago at the gas station and we chatted about the dissertation stuff, it hit me: I don't want to be a scholar.

I don't want to be a tenured professor in a college with a graduate program

I don't want to publish scholarship on anything except that which makes me happy

I don't want to play politics or become a cog in the machinery of this petty pace from day to day

I don't want to teach over-privileged trust fund babies who have nothing compelling to say

I DO want to teach; to write fiction (or whatever the hell else floats my boat); to maintain my dear friendships; to continue trying to inspire the kinds of students who need the most inspiration; to be a member of a community that fosters independent thought, etc.

This changes everything for me as I approach the end of my doctoral program. The whole reason I applied to a Ph.D. in the first place was so I could keep doing what I love for the rest of my life with some job security, not so I could be an elitist snob who uses phrases like "discourse communities" in my daily life. When I walk into a classroom and meet a new batch of students who think reading is a waste of time, or that they have nothing of value to say, or that they aren't intelligent free-thinkers, I get excited. I get excited even when I know it's going to be hard work to shepherd some of them to the end of the semester, especially when they tell me that their boyfriends beat them, or that they spent the weekend in jail for... whatever. I know that at the end, when I ask them about the choices I made for the syllabus, at least one person will defend Bartleby the Scrivener and that makes me smile.

But I became victim to the rhetoric that if I'm not reading Foucault in pure orgasmic bliss and talking philosophy with someone over vegetarian food, I've somehow fallen short of the mark.
That if I'm not in the mindset of wishing to spend my spare hours in the future poring over others' scholarship in a smelly and extremely RED library, I'm not who I say I am. And if I my creative projects planned for future days don't include at least one of the various theoretical approaches of modernist thought, then I'm a hack. If I write a book that people will want to read, I dunno, for the sake of ENTERTAINMENT, then I will be a sellout. A traitor to the hundreds who toil in obscurity in small presses, properly starving for their art. I admire those folks, but it's not my bag.

I sat this morning with Jamison over bagels and Darn Good Coffee and we talked about vows we make to each other that have nothing to do with the ones you'd say at a wedding. The vow we decided upon was not to make each other miserable and to strive to be happy until the ends of our lives and to support each other to those ends. That is, I never want to succumb to sitting around and waiting to die as our parents have much too young, and I hope to always follow my passion wherever that leads, until the end of my days. This is what I take to DU this fall, and god help whoever tries to stand in my way.