What a week. This week just kept ratcheting up in intensity and although it did not get to pants-shitting levels, it did get to crying-in-office levels. Regular personal stress (planning a conference) ramped up and then combined with national stress (pictures of the Boston bombing) and it was an ugly brew. Whenever I cry in my office now, it’s like each time it’s worse because while crying I’m also remembering the last time I cried in my office, and the time before that, so it’s turning into this layered experience of sorrow. The Boston marathon; the announcement of a colleague’s little child’s death; that horrible article by that maniac Gene Weingarten about people leaving their babies in hot cars all day; Sandy; Sandy Hook; etc. So now when I cry in my office it’s like it’s a reminder to remember all those other things and cry about them too again. I am creating my own psychic miasma and I think I need to smudge in there or bring in a Tibetan singing bowl or something. It doesn’t help that there’s no window.
The violence of our era seems weirdly inevitable. The Onion’s recent “This What World Like Now” headline, as usual, pretty much hits the nail on the head. I wonder what future eras will call our era? The names of eras also change the more time that passes. Like the time of the rule of some specific and world-changing group of Athenians eventually gets subsumed into “ANCIENT GREECE,” which comprises hundreds of years of history during which tons of incredible stuff happened. And then even “ANCIENT GREECE” eventually also gets folded into “THE BRONZE AGE,” which basically describes like 3,000 years of human life. In another 10,000 years, Ancient Greece to the 21st century will feel like one small unified historical period that students will struggle to understand even the broadest differences amongst. “When was the steam engine invented?” “560 B.C.E.” “Wrong–but you were close!” Or imagine scholarly papers trying to get to the bottom of, like, was “George Bush” two people or one person, and was he a president or a king, and what’s a president anyway. Just like today–does the Trojan War “feel” that far apart, temporally, from the Pelopponesian War? My guess is no, unless you are a history nerd. But the Pelopponesian War was in I think the 5th century B.C.E., and the Trojan War was so many centuries before that that for a long time people thought it was just a myth. Like by the time of the Pelopponesian War, the Trojan War was ALREADY A MYTH. But to us we’re like “oh yeah all those wars those toga guys fought.” Like Socrates was probably alive during both of them or something. But they’re from vastly different time periods! One of them was fought BY GODS.
It would be like if we “felt” Michael Jackson and Jesus Christ as being from roughly the same historical period, and having roughly equivalent vibes. That’s going to happen one day! That is wild.
Before that kind of collapsing happens though, what term will the Age of Enlightenment, the Romantic Era, the Twentieth Century, and our current dreadful time get folded into? I like to try to think of the terms that will be applied in the future 100 years from now, 500, 5,000. the Twentieth Century and our ongoing current era for example might come to be called The Age of Energy, depending on how the whole peak oil thing ends up going. Like imagine a future where we don’t use energy at all, and people look back and marvel at our cars and computers and smog-filled skies. Maybe we will be called The Age of Violence. The Terrorist Age. The Fossil Fuel Age. Or maybe the future will be so horrible that we’ll get a cool name like The Neo-Enlightenment or The Age Of Human Rights. Oh brother. Old-school cultural historians like my spirit animal JB think we are in the period of western decline, so maybe we’ll get one of those “End Of” terms later.
Poor us.
“Guns Don’t Kill People, Democrats Voting Against Gun Control Due To Pressure From The Gun Lobby Do.”
So anyway, I was really stressed out about this conference, which of course in light of the desperate-as-usual global situation of humanity in general is pretty small potatoes, but we can only live the lives we have and so that was my struggle at that time. But I think it went well. We got a surprisingly large turn-out, all the papers were interesting, everybody enjoyed talking to each other. I hope the keynote had a good time as I really wanted to impress him and make him like me which I know is sort of a craven motivation but you’d understand if you were a junior scholar without a permanent job. A life lived trying to balance on a wobbly ol’ melty ice floe. Plus I just like the guy, personally. He’s incredible. He had this like 40 page beautifully written article that he just spontaneously turned into an hour long conversational talk. Like he was reading his article and translating it into normal conversation, instantaneously. The old man snuck a peek at it afterward and was stunned and even a little bit frightened.
Afterward we went out to a huge dinner and I drank two martinis and now I don’t feel so hot, but I am very relaxed. For weeks I have been dreaming of this moment, when it will all be over and I will be on the couch with snoopy slumbering with his head in my lap. My paper is done, my conference is done, my semester is basically done. My summer is more or less beginning, at this very moment. And in the summer lies delight and pleasure and eating enough calories each day–too many, even! What luxury (literally). And I will submit my book proposal, write an article, plan a syllabus, and do something else I can’t remember right now. And also swim in rivers and dump a slurpee on Steve’s leg.
Although for the next two weeks I do have a ton of band practice, because we are playing a show. But that’s fun stuff.
Another thing is that the whole time this paper/conference stuff was going on I kept thinking “I really want to read that Horace Mann sex abuse New Yorker article,” and as the days passed and I never had time to read it I started building it up in my mind like it was going to be this incredible experience to finally read it, and just now I finally read it and was just totally enervated and demoralized by it, but like, what was I expecting???
