The Myth of the Breeze

sniffles and a rant about school

I am sick and in bed and have thought about stay­ing here until I feel like a func­tion­ing human being, but unfor­tu­nately I have to pee so I don’t think I will last much longer. The wind has been howl­ing out­side for two days and every once in a while the power flashes off and then back on and we have to reset all of our clocks. I have another win­dow open on my com­puter and am wait­ing to watch the video of Ton Cruise talk­ing about Sci­en­tol­ogy that Lisa sent me. But not until I fin­ish a blog posting.

Ok, but I want to say some­thing about school. The thing is that I really like it. Maybe too much. I thought I came back to school to learn pro­fes­sional skills, to become a bet­ter swim­mer. But there is no ques­tion of sink or swim in school. I can float. By that I don’t mean coast. I work. But it’s all a day­dream about the world and rev­el­ing in the fact that there is too much to know and so you’ll never get bored. Maybe tired, but not bored.

I see this as more than a bit dan­ger­ous. Acad­e­mia is incred­i­bly self-reflexive and, at least in the pro­gram I am in, begs us to sit­u­ate our­selves prop­erly and find work that is not an impo­si­tion. As in– don’t work where you aren’t wel­come. And when I linger too long on my own iden­tity, I worry that I may be left with few places to go. Fur­ther, acad­e­mia finds prob­lems in every­thing. Every­thing. And I am strug­gling with the idea that I have always some­how thought that solv­ing prob­lems makes things sim­pler. But in fact, my very pres­ence in a sit­u­a­tion makes it more com­plex, and some­times the accep­tance of that com­plex­ity is all the sim­plic­ity I can find.

Acad­e­mia, of course, does not solely untan­gle. In fact, the very con­cept of research has a keen abil­ity to tie very tight and com­pli­cated knots. And so, while I may get to unpack con­cepts and the­o­ries and sys­tems of the world and at the end of the day feel like I’ve accom­plished some­thing because I have a bet­ter grasp on the way soci­ety under­stands (for exam­ple) its rela­tion­ship with nature, I have in fact tied a lit­tle bit tighter knot because I’ve stepped just an inch fur­ther away from the world.

Did you know that Davis is a Land Grant Uni­ver­sity? I didn’t know this until I got here, but I have fast learned why this can be a major prob­lem. In essence, the Cal­i­for­nia gov­ern­ment gave the uni­ver­sity some land in exchange for the uni­ver­sity cre­at­ing tech­nol­ogy to take into the world. So to be in a place that has always worked under the mis­sion of impos­ing ideas onto a greater soci­ety, being in a pro­gram that ques­tions that very mis­sion is per­plex­ing. I’m not really a part of that mis­sion, but I’m not apart from it either. I am of this machine, but I am try­ing my damnedest not to be that machine. And I don’t know (yet) how to do that.

Ok, for the first time in four days I can breathe through my nose. Per­haps it is time to get out of my bed. But first, Tom.