I am a rehabilitating academic. That short sentence requires explanation. First, yes, I do recognize cliché. You, dear reader (there, another one), will just have to deal with that. No excuses on my part, but I do have some hostility issues that have been shoved down and repressed thanks to antidepressants for the better part of the last year–wait, not better, just the… majority of 2015. And do note: when someone is waning off some of the antidepressants, watch out. So, hello, hostility, it’s been a while!
But back to that first sentence. First: “academic.” Please recognize that I see many sorts of people and many sorts of attitudes, world views–zeitgeists, if you will–that qualify as academic. The vagrant poet who offers sparkling, eye-raising observations about the crazy complicated brutal nature of humans. Or the elder who just began something brand new, such as curating and tending to a vegetable garden, and does it through a steely independent vision coupled at some point with what others have offered as templates for doing so. Or likewise, the elder who has been gardening for thirty-five years and continues to tinker and experiment and *play* with different ways of doing so every spring. Or the child who can’t accept (not out of rebellion, but for some reason, just…can’t) a certain idea or way of doing things in favor of continuing to ponder and work out other ways of seeing or doing that need an audience or outlet. Maybe something scientific, maybe something cosmological, maybe something deeply peculiar and rarely considered with any great level of detail or reflection.
Nevertheless, I am in particular a university professor…for the time being. I have seen myself as an academic for a long time, over fifteen years at least, which dates to the time I began my Ph.D. study. Perhaps it is for that reason that I am starting this blog. I don’t know what else to do with the racing in my head that is refused a track. Refused by authorities, superiors, conventions, and yes, those damn antidepressants.
I agree, you see, that everyone has an anthropology. But how long does it take to see its richness, or make use of it, or invite it to be something that can be helpful to others? As Ouisa Kittredge laments at the end of John Guare’s brilliant Six Degrees of Separation, “there is color in my life, but I’m not aware of any structure.” Perhaps that’s the way things will or need to be in my life. But the incessant ringing of that damn racing–it’ll drive me into a sinkhole if I don’t start putting something out there through this blog.