The End of Blogtober

As the month drew to an end, I stopped daily posting without feeling much conflict about it. I was distracted by other important things to do (son visiting from out of town, paid work, etc.) and I often just forgot. There's something about long stretches of unallocated time that allows one to ruminate about it and feel guilty and the lack of those empty hours meant I didn't feel the tension I'd reported in other posts. You might think this level of irresponsibility indicates a failed project, but that's not how I feel about. Twenty-seven posts is good enough for me, with two others awaiting completion. and I imagine many of the posts are even a little interesting.

I imagine, because I'm not ready to go back and read them yet. I don't know when that will be the case, nor do I know when I will know when.

I might even post again tomorrow, the last day of the month, but don't count on it. What more do I have to say?

Acknowledgments

I was just starting a book and noticed myself skipping over the acknowledgments. This is the section (usually in the begining) in which the author thanks others who contributed to the work in some way (sometimes by merely being encouraging) and I wondered if and when people would read this section. I am asking, more specifically, about people other than those being thanked or people researching the life of the author or researching how to write an acknowledgment of their own or any reason other than to be present at the actual thanking.

I assume that the author has (most often) already thanked these people in real life and is mentioning their help in the book itself in order to be public about it. It is a ceremony, akin to a wedding, in which a relationship is announced to the world officially. Reading acknowledgments would be like being a wedding guest, though without having to be invited or to buy a gift, but only to the actual vows and not to the after party.

I'm not the sort of person to attend the wedding of strangers so my behavior may be understandable. I also skipped the copyright page, because I am not a lawyer. and the note about the typeface, because I am not a fontophile. I'm just looking for actual content and I assume many other readers are like me. I do read the credits of movies sometimes, wondering who played some character or sung some song, for example, both not part of the movie content. There can be some thanking in movie credits as well, though I can't at the moment remember an example.

I'm also not the kind of person who watches award shows, another occasion where thanking is an important activity. Also, I suppose that winning an award is sort of like being thanked. When Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize, he was subsequently called "rude" for not acknowledging the receipt publicly, like not saying "You're welcome" to their thank you. Or is it like saying "I love you" and not getting an "I love you too" in return?

I understand that award shows are quite popular and by not being a fan, I may be disqualifying myself as a discussant of the phenomenon. I'm not sure I have anything more to say about acknowledgments than I already have. I'm going to return to my book now, thank you.

Love thy enemy

My alter ego claims to be just like you, but this isn't enough for me to trust you. Is it that I don't trust myself? Is it that I secretly believe in my own uniqueness?

If the latter, the secret is now out, but it's a secret guarded by an 'if.' I both believe in and doubt my uniqueness. Uniqueness is never to be trusted because it is wholly other. That means it is alien, and even if the aliens come in peace, by the end of the movie, they always betray us. It would be a boring movie otherwise. I suppose it would work if we betray them instead. Our excuse would be lack of trust, because any other reason would make us the bad guys.

Is there an unbridgeable distance between us? If our differences are superficial, it means there is not.

But maybe the betrayal scenario is as follows. Because you are just like me, you share my doubts and distrust. And because you are like me, you will use your lack of trust, as I would, as an excuse to betray me, thus I must preemptively strike. And because you are like me, I figure you plan to preemptively strike so I must hurry.

If you are just like me, must I thank you for reading my blog? Why wouldn't you read the blog of someone just like you? But, since I would like to be thanked, I must conclude you would as well, and so I thank you.

Practice practicality.

So let's get practical.
It's Sunday morning. I don't feel like writing right now. What do I do with this feeling?
When I didn't feel like running in the morning, I'd recognize this feeling as related to how starting to run felt and knew it would change after a mile. I knew that if I just made it through the first mile, it would be OK. This isn't true about writing. Yes, I'm writing now and it's sort of OK, but at any moment, I could hit a wall (as we runners say). It's true that starting, sometimes, is enough but not always. The metaphor breaks down because with running, starting almost always was enough.
Let's try another metaphor: meditation. The way to think about it is that you just sit and follow the instructions for the given time period and you get what you get. Translated into writing would be: You just write stuff for some fixed parameter--number of words, or period of time and not worry about content so much. The "morning pages" version requires three pages of continual, hand written output. But in the end, the pages are to be tossed. Not so with a blog post.
Blog posts are to be exhibited for all to see (and if you are a part of that 'all,' thank you for reading.) And they potentially go through an editing process. And the writing isn't continual because content is considered. There's some attempt at coherence.
I seem to remember that there are writers who "write in the morning" and sometimes produce raw material and at other times produce something they eventually discard. At the moment, I can't remember who any of these writers are, except that they are well known (or were) and thus were asked for their "process."
The search for metaphors is, in this post, an attempt to answer the question, "What do I do when I don't want to be writing?" The first metaphor, running, answers with, "You will be rewarded after the first mile." The second metaphor, meditation, answers with "There is no goal, so you can't fail." This is just one part of it. There is also the belief that there is a reward to having a "meditation practice." There is some kind of gain that is not immediately visible. But there is also the expectation that it will, eventually become visible. When that "eventually" will arrive remains unspoken. Expecting a reward in an unspecified future gives the meditator hope. We hear of other meditators reporting the benefits they have experienced to bolster this hope. Some can actually demonstrate gains which they attribute to their meditation practice (though there's no proof that the gains were caused by the practice and the cause and effect relationship could even be the reverse.) In addition, the doer is told to expect it to be difficult and thus not to fall victim to despair. The hope serves as the immediate motivation when you want to stop, like the "make it through the first mile" is the hope for the runner--but that is one which people actually get to experience regularly.
The third metaphor, morning pages, is a lot like the second. You accept on faith and the reports and attributed successes of others that it's good for you.
These are skeptical times. You could even call them paranoid times, though paranoia doesn't mean that "they" aren't also actually out to get you. Promotion and self-promotion are everywhere. People give advice because they enjoy the role of advice giver and so are rewarded for claiming their point of view. Others are consciously out to rip you off (and no doubt some are unconsciously out to do so.)
I know of no one else doing this post-a-day-ish thing. I suspect there are others out there who have done so and I could possibly dig them up with a little googling. I also suspect that some of their blogs would read embarrassingly awful. They may or may not agree with my assessment of the quality of their output. They may not care what I think. Some writers and performers have said they never read reviews of their work.
The appeal of Florence Foster Jenkins' story is that we know she is bad and yet we are rooting for her, somehow. She is not without narcissism but we don't feel threatened by it. We laugh at her, but we don't turn on her. She spends her life in a fantasy world, but perhaps we all do and thus empathize with her without actually having to confront our own delusions.

Bless me.

Bless me father for I have sinned. It's been 3 days since my last post. Just when I'd loosened the rules too! Coincidence?

I'd thought so. The past 2 days I'd been very busy. With work work--serious stuff, not stupid blog posts. I could probably have posted something anyway if I'd really wanted to, but that would break the spirit of the rules. The idea is for my posts not to be pro-forma but be actual expressions of myself--which takes time and an investment of consciousness.

So, would it have been better or worse if I'd made those meaningless rule-following posts just to meet the requirements. A little of both, I guess. It would be a bad precedent to just post filler. But it is a bad precedent not to post at all.

The first kills the purpose of the discipline. The second makes the discipline into a nothing.

One could argue that it is impossible to fulfill the requirements without some of the original intent slipping in. You express yourself even in the act of not expressing yourself, since part of you is that withholding of expression and that part is being expressed. And that isn't some technicality but an actual phenomenon. For example, see my previous (3 days ago) post. It is sort of pro-forma but my conflict with the rules is evident, though I was unaware this would be the case when I posted it. How revealing is that!

Still, something gets lost once it becomes OK to make ritual posts. The need for intentionality (both I and spellcheck are suspicious of that word) is an unspoken rule of the discipline. To put it another way, posts are supposed to be attempts to express the truth, not failures to hide it. This distinction looks clearer than it actually is, because the conscious effort only works by enlisting the cooperation of the unconscious component of creativity. Inherent in the act is a permission and a welcoming of the previously hidden aspect of who one is. The consequent discovery of what had been invisible is your reward.

The reverse of this process results from the habit of ritual. It is the sin of idolatry in that creativity becomes encouraged to hide. Your life becomes more unexamined and thus less worth living.

The above could probably use some editing. There's a lot more to be said and yet, I'm losing the organizational energy that makes it coherent. I want to talk about religion and how my starting this post as a mock religious ritual turned out to be more than just a gimmick. I want to talk about free association in psychotherapy as ritual revealing the unconscious. I reach a point where I want to talk about so many things but lack what is necessary to make it understandable.

The rules change again

Instead of creating a new post, I spent time editing previous posts. It seems to me that this activity should, in moderation at least, be allowed and even encouraged. This new post is just to mark the occasion.

Feeling good was good enough for me.

This morning when I awoke (I want to say from a strange dream, and I did have one involving biking across some kind of divide, but it would read too much like Kafka's Metamorphosis) I dreaded writing a blog post. That itself wouldn't be new. What was new was the reason why.

Previously, my problem was that I would not be able to figure out how to say what I needed to communicate. This time, I was afraid that I had nothing to say.

To be fair, I didn't feel that my nothing put me in contrast to others who knew things. I saw them all as deluded. They didn't know their nothing was nothing.

But I envied them. They were living in a dream, perhaps, but at least they had a roof over their heads. I had nothing. They had complicated systems of understanding, derived from self-evident truths, but I had lost my truths. I couldn't even be sure of that very observation.

The feeling that accompanied this was depression. It wasn't the kind where you took a pill and your mood might improve. That seemed like heading in the wrong direction. It would be like pulling the covers over my head and pretending. But, as before, even that kind of clarity wouldn't stay with me. Maybe pretending, despite how it sounded, was the correct solution. Maybe what I was calling make believe, was no more artificial than my radical self-doubt. Maybe the distinction between true and false was a fake one.

Then I had a cup of coffee, and wrote this post, as if from a distance. I was taking a scenic overlook point of view of my plight, rather than suffering through it, and that felt a lot better.

Thanking Machines

There are rules for how we are supposed to feel in given situations, and rules for how we are supposed to express those feelings. We are taught as kids to say "please" and "thank you" independently of anything we might feel. It has become polite in general to claim feelings regardless of how one really feels on all sorts of occasions and impolite not to.
There is even a segment of the economy that thrives on it, its most well known business being Hallmark. Just because you send a "thinking of you" card, doesn't mean you're lying, though. In fact, it's impossible to send such a card without at least a moment's thinking, but there's something intervening between thought and action that neutralizes its emotional content. The neutralization could even be, in part, more polite than presuming on the relationship with the full force of feeling.
The corner bodega has a sign in the window that says it appreciates my patronage. It is hand drawn, its informality adding to its sincerity. A spelling mistake might have helped further, but there were none. The neutralization element spares both customer and owner the embarrassment of excessive intimacy. In the process, I, who have never gone in there, am invited to shop and be appreciated.

The road not taken

I was just reading an article in the Times Magazine section. I was referred to the article by an email on a mailing list by someone I respected enough to follow, though it was really the title of the article that drew me in: "Generation Adderall."

It was a mini-autobiography of its author's life on that drug. It was well written and the author was likable, two good reasons to believe everything she said, which was, in brief, that it did her all kinds of harm. It made her an addict until only three years ago when she was finally able to kick with the help of a psychiatrist. She describes the creative process as follows: "You start one place, go through hell and wind up somewhere else, somewhere that surprises you." She and her doctor agree that "Adderall [ . . . ] was a perversion of that journey."

The hell she is talking about, I assume, is the same one I confront writing these blog posts. Imagine if I could just take a pill and pervert that journey! She is trying to say that the hell is a necessary element, but why should that be? Is it a moral issue? Is she saying that without the suffering, you are creating without paying the required fee? Are you thus some kind of thief?

Indeed, her writing skills and her degrees were earned on this perverted journey, so by rights, she should return them. Still, she didn't avoid suffering. Her life as an addict seems like punishment enough to hear her describe it. If anything, she has overpaid and the universe owes her a refund.

I'm not convinced she would have gotten through school without adderall. The control case for this experiment was not run. When I was in school, there were assignments I couldn't face the hell of doing. Adderall was not available for my generation.

In a sense, I am taking the easy way out by picking on her, thus avoiding the hell of figuring out what to post today, but my hatred of the culture of assertion has taken me over like an illegal drug. She asserts with the confidence only a 33 year old could have, though when I was that age, neither my confidence nor my writing skills were at her level.

I'd like to take the opportunity to theorize about the workings of ADD medication. Some of us are more complicated than others. Our lack of focus reflects our lack of simplicity, seeing many different paths when we're supposed to be only looking at the one ahead, since it leads in the direction we're supposed to be taking. There are various ways to simplify our lives, and one of those is chemical. Adderall helps us avoid the extraneous pulls on our attention. It gives us more confidence that our previously chosen direction is the correct direction.

Having written the above, I lack the confidence to continue on that path. I'm not sure I want to continue in any direction at all. I have in the past, taken this woman's point of view, asserting that ADD is not a disorder and thus not something to be treated medically. In so saying, I didn't mean that there aren't those who have difficulty focusing and could use help, perhaps via chemicals, to get on with their lives, but that the difficulty was not something wrong with them, say, a chemical imbalance, or a genetic spanner in the brainworks. In fact, I'm on both sides of the issue, except for the part where we call it a disease.

In the end, the need to select a single side of the issue is representative of the problem is is supposed to solve.

What I'm doing.

I was just reading an article and the author explains the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning before getting into how statistics are used incorrectly much of the time. I understand that there are people who don't know this distinction and need to be educated and not only doesn't this unnecessary lesson bother me, I read it to see how the author contrives to explains things and to get to what follows.

When writing, however, I'd assume my readers knew the difference, and that if I'd added an explaination, my reader would get impatient or even insulted at my assumption that she didn't know this already. Sometimes I feel like anything I might write would fall into the "everyone already knows that" category.

I hate what I call the culture of assertion where experts proclaim stuff. I understand that people would change the channel from a guy saying "we don't really know what happened" to listen to the guy who tells them what took place in great detail, even when much of it turns out later to have been incorrect. I remember hearing on the radio, on 9/11, some announcer saying with great assurance that it was an accident with a private plane and not terrorism. I'll bet no one lost their job over that broadcast made when no one knew yet what had actually happened.

If you go on a job interview, and they ask how you'd solve a problem, do you imagine you would get the job if you answer, "I'd ask my colleagues for help." because you've shown you're a team player?

So, let me assert right now that I don't know what I'm doing.

It's not all my fault this is so difficult.

Part of my problem is I have limited the topics I would post about here. I could write about all sorts of things but I only want posts that are fit for public consumption. So you won't be hearing about the dream I had last night, for example, on account of I don't believe dreams to be random neuron firings as many people today do.

I'm just figuring this out now. Which means I'm willing to write about how long it takes to figure out the obvious. You could have commented and let me know. I'd have thanked you.

Status report.

I know someone with a strong fear of coercion. It has to do with her relationship with her father growing up in which she felt unable to counter his demands. As a result, anything that resembles an imperative, is resisted--even something like "Have fun!" What I'm wondering is if I am similar with my hatred of constraints, even those voluntarily taken on to achieve some end I desire.

Faced with the actual constraint, what I feel is sad like a victim, a fear of being unable to successfully comply no matter how hard I try, and a resulting failure that confirms something horrible about myself that previously I just suspected.

I just finished grading a pile of exams which brought up similar feelings. I had no choice but to do so and yet the (predominantly low) grades I was giving weren't objectively fair no matter how hard I'd try, and perhaps the whole educational enterprise in which I'm engaged is at best futile and at worst harmful (though someone else might be inflicting worse harm were I to quit.) Luckily, the effort involved doesn't also make me feel incompetent, so unlike writing, I am assured of making it through each semester.

It feels much better (stronger, less victim-like) to rebel and I am thus taking next semester off. How much better it will also feel, I imagine, to stop all this writing foolishness, but I seem to always end up returning to it eventually. It feels like the only thing of real value I could do, despite the contrary feeling that nothing of that nature has any ultimate value, and the subsequent conclusion that I have no value. I suppose a more rational conclusion is that I am unable to tell what does and does not have value and it makes just as much sense to believe that refusing to write has value.

In the end, my dilemma is whether navigating the primarily unpleasant feelings this writing project evokes is an exercise in masochism or a journey toward some kind of achievement. And only by taking the time and making the effort could I possibly reach an answer.

Hope and change.

When I started this project I was full of hope, but now that has changed. All it took were a dozen days, several of which were painful and two of which went off the rails. So, I don't know. This may be the last post for a while. Or not. Who knows? It could change again.

Sales

I don't want to be doing this now. Thanks to the discipline, I'm doing it anyway.

It's not like there's something else I want to do. It's that this feels like a annoying activity. I am not in touch with a feeling that it is accomplishing anything other than fulfilling a requirement. I'll bet this is how my students feel and it's no wonder they often fail. Slave labor is known to be inefficient. I try to say things in class to capture their interest but at best I entertain. The subject itself isn't anything they want to engage with. It's not meaningful to them. Getting them interested in it is a sales job.

I've never wanted to work in sales but: here I am. I use an ad-block on my browser but I need to advertise to my students. The usual way to sell math is with degrees and future employment possibilities. Or more abstractly, that they can think of themselves as a college graduate (once they've made it through) or as a smart person in comparison to others.

I'd always resented those in class who would raise their hands to ask how they would use what they were learning in their lives, but their question, for which I had no real answer, was one I'd do well to confront.

I understand that the ability to express oneself in writing is a useful goal but I remain a bit doubtful that this will help achieve it. At best I can get used to the experience of starting out blank and eventually coming up with something interesting. Today's "interesting" is a new understanding of why my students don't engage with the subject I teach. I don't have a solution but at least I have a better appreciation of the problem.

I came here to post because of my one-a-day discipline, but behind that is the goal of expressing in language what would otherwise disappear when I do. I am under the impression that I have something to say and that there are people to say it to. This project is to find out if that's so, and if it is, to say what needs to be said.

But that underlying motivation gets lost in the moment when faced with a blank page like the goal of losing weight gets lost when faced with a chocolate eclair. It's not that it's forgotten as an idea. That's easy to conjure up. What gets lost is the drive to fulfill it. This is where the structure of the project comes in to keep things happening.

I'm laying this out here, not because it's a profound concept, but because I need to remind my structure-hating self of what this project is about.

When we think of ourselves (and by 'we' I mean 'me' but I believe this is true of many or most people) our underlying model is one where everything we know is available like a table with plates of food at an all-you-can-eat buffet. The reality is that our immediate consciousness is pretty tiny with almost everything other than the idea of the moment being background. That, too, is a model in which we conceive of the background as potential foreground with a shift in attention.

Even as I write this, trying to find metaphors and analogies, I know that this is all wrong, but my knowing doesn't manage to replace it with an improved version that feels right.

I don't even know if the "we" I'm invoking is just contemporary Westerners, or all civilized people, or anyone capable of thinking, or . . . And I seem to be stuck in thinking that way, like Kant's a prioris were meant to indicate apply to everyone. The word "lost" suggests something that could be found. We use language as a way to navigate through it all. This "we" which is, at a minimum, me and you, is expected to follow and agree.

I feel anxious that when I return to this it will be terribly unclear, to the point that I will barely remember what I meant to say.

That anxiety is prompting me to stop writing, but maybe I can make up with volume what I lack in coherence.

We see others as essentially like ourselves (I am just like you--which was a kind of joke--is essentially how we approach the world, with the concepts of culture and character and intelligence and education accounting for any differences) but is this an accurate description of who "we" are?

Thank you for not reading.

Thank you for not reading my blog.

It's not really a blog any more than the results of NaNoWriMo constitute a novel. At best it's the raw material for a novel which will require a great deal of editing. At worst it's the side effects of an exercise whose main result was the experience.

I started this blog with the idea that I would turn out coherent finished products once a day. The real result is that I'm learning that isn't really possible. At best I can approximate that. Some days, what I write will make some sense. Other days, less so. Some days it will have something somewhat interesting in it while other days (and I'm thinking of yesterday now) it won't cohere.

I haven't saved yesterday's writing yet. I'm afraid to look it over. I could edit it into a blog post but it's a new day already so I'm not sure that's allowed. Certainly I should at least finish today's post first or else I'll fall behind and never catch up.

I'm allowed to edit yesterday's writing because:

• I'm making up the rules as I go along.
• Today's new made-up rule is that I have to start the new day's post before going back to the old.
• I have, in fact, edited previous day's posts before (though only in minor ways) so there's precedent.
• We're trying to have a minimum of arbitrary constraints.
• And, you'll remember, I dislike constraints and have only accepted those few I did accept provisionally.
• I'm not sure what the word "provisionally" means, but I meant that I reserve the right to do whatever the fuck I want.
• If that last point is true, then the whole project is a lie.
• It's both true and not-true. It's being worked out in the project itself. It's being worked out in this very list.

So, thank you for not reading because it's not yet ready to be read by anyone but me and if others are reading it will just inhibit me even more.

Now I'm ready to go back and look at what I wrote yesterday and deal with it in some way.

NanoBlogo

This writing every day thing reminds me of when I was doing NaNoWriMo, the yearly attempt (though only twice tried by me) to write a novel in a month. At least this time there's no word count constraint.

I don't like constraints. Who does? The theory is that we all do in the right context. To understand why, you need to stop thinking like a Mexican and start thinking like a Donald. The wall isn't to keep you out, it's to keep others from getting in. The "others" in the case of a discipline of daily writing are feelings that you don't want to be doing this. I'm talking about what I wrote in my October third post--the Bad Idea one.

More accurately, the feelings still get through, but acting on them is kept out. I had the feelings today, and they slowed down my start, but I started none the less, and now I'm getting into it. It's like when I used to run every day. I knew the first mile would be difficult and I'd remind myself (almost continually!) that it would feel less bad later while running that first mile. And, most often, it did start to feel OK as I passed the one mile marker, more or less.

Some of the OK was provided by a feeling of accomplishment and the rest was the diminished pain as my body began to wake up (it was a first thing in the morning activity.) Over time it became a habit, part of how I would wake my body up at the start of a day.

By analogizing with NaNoWriMo, I'm saying I could stop after a month. And to do the analogy right, it's "NaBloWriMo" but the other sounded batter. Besides The Na part (National) is false anyway--since it's international, but they kept the old name because it sounded better.

I haven't yet decided if I will stop after a month. I could stop and start a novel at that point since it would then be November, when NaNoWriMo is scheduled to start. It's too early to make these kinds of decisions. It would be like deciding about my running plans during that first, atypically difficult mile.

At the moment, having an only one month commitment is a comfort. It was not part of the original plan but, with the help of today's analogy, I could tack it on and make it look like it belongs there.

We're in a relationship.

I can just start writing and figure out the "topic" later, or I can figure out a topic and just sit here until it's figured.

As you can see, I've made my choice.

What you actually see, is I made my choice but you don't see how long I sat here first thinking of topics before making it. Writing is selecting. Some stuff you get to see, other stuff is invisible or edited out. For example, if I didn't tell you, you'd have no way of knowing that two hours have passed since the previous sentence. Some things needed to be done in a timely manner, but I'm back now. Thanks for waiting [insert smiley face ].

However, the fact that what you get to read isn't the unedited flow of my consciousness doesn't make it lies. I'm making a best effort, which requires things like, say, fixing typos at a minimum. As you probably know if you ever tried to write anything, it always deviates somewhat from what you'd intended to express. It had to be pushed through the strainer of language.

Take the word "gratitude" for example. We'd said it was a feeling, but we ignored the fact that it exists in a relationship. And take the word "relationship." I use it to mean anything in the field of (let's say) two people, even if they are strangers whose contact lasted for a moment--e.g. when you paid for a Metrocard (what we New Yorkers use to ride the subway). In this respect, I suspect I'm in the minority of users of the word "relationship."

Often, metrocards (I'm going with the lowercase 'm' now) are bought from machines, and often machines will say (or "say") "Thank you." I don't admit to relationships between person and machine. I realize I've lost the following of the A.I. community, or of those expecting the so-called singularity touted by Kurzweil. Those relationships, if they even existed, may just have to come to an end at this point.

Also, some gratitude is public. I'm thinking of that expressed by a winner at an awards ceremony. And some gratitude is required to be public if it is to be taken seriously by the recipient. If someone thanked me for helping them but omitted my name from the list of those thanked publicly, I'd have to wonder what that meant.

The pursuit of unhappiness.

Today was the first day I forgot to write in this blog, or it would have been were I not writing in it now. "Forgot" is accurate. It didn't occur to me until now. And that happened just by accident. I was closing a tab in which I googled something and it turned out to be "Thank you for using" that was the subject of my search. The search took place yesterday but I didn't close the tab and now here it was to remind me of the failure.

Did I feel bad about it? About not writing? About forgetting? No, to both. Should I have?

It's interesting to think about a situation where feeling bad is a goal. The pursuit of unhappiness. Feeling bad would indicate, what? Seriousness? Depth of commitment?

I guess my real goal is to keep writing and not to give up. The every day part is less important--a contour to my plan.

And in the end, I wrote this.

Commitment

The dates of my posts, are not those of "every day," but the posts were actually written on the mornings of each day. Today is October 5th and will likely match the date of what I wrote yesterday. I mention this because, though I'm under the impression I'm writing for myself, I imagine someone else coming along and faulting me on my resolve to post daily.

I stopped for a while after that last sentence--I had confronted myself with the evidence of a crime (I've been reading courtroom fiction lately) and was nonplussed (a word I've never used before but it seems right), not because I was guilty--the times are when I "saved" and not when I wrote--but because of the feeling that I need to explain persisted despite any external accuser.

The actual crime (Freud said feelings of guilt were always about an actual crime which was not necessarily the same as what you believed yourself guilty of) is my expectation of imminent failure. It's a future crime in which I stop writing. I expect this to occur because I'm not really committed. I'm playing at commitment. I'm going through the motions, like a non-thankful person being polite.

I don't really believe in commitment and my disbelief feels like self-acceptance.

Or maybe it's that commitment for which there's no real penalty for breaking is not a real commitment.

Or it's that the penalty for breaking a commitment needs to be more than the breaking itself.

Is that the difference between a commitment and a resolve?

How goes it?

And that is typically how it goes. It starts off with some excitement, energy, motivation and it ends with "not such a good idea." Not that we're at the end, necessarily. What is this syndrome about?

I ask with the expectation that I can answer. The syndrome is the realization, or feeling, that I cannot answer.

So can I or can't I?

We don't know yet.

If I believe I can, I will proceed. If I believe I can't, I might as well stop right here. Is there any value to trying and failing?

Is there any value to trying and succeeding? Is there any value to anything?

If there's no value, there's no absence of value.

I seem to be unable to write a paragraph with more than one sentence in it. This is because I reject my thought as soon as I come up with it. I can't go on. I must go on. Becket managed to write a lot of stuff so the disease from which I'm suffering need not be terminal.

I have a patient who told me that her father would treat her excitement with "oh, that old thing." It was new to her but old to him and he'd let her know that what she was excited about wasn't exciting. It was naive, foolish, something to be made fun of. Maybe he was nice about it, not so much making fun but saying "how cute that you think this is something new." He was being affectionate (maybe) but she took it as dismissal. And now, when ever I assert anything to her, she dismisses me.

The dismissal sometimes takes the form of "I don't want to hear your ideas, I want you to listen to mine." At other times, it takes the form of "This is a subject that I know a lot more of than you. I've studied it for years."

The first form of the dismissal is more to the point. It's not about the content, but the form. Her relationship with her father was about who gets to dismiss whom and she is recreating it with me. I've told her this and she dismissed it, saying something like "you put it in your language and I reject your language. Why can't you use my language?"

Her language is that of her religion. I believe that, historically, she sought to appeal her father's proclamations to a higher authority. He may dismiss her, but God is on her side. To tell her this would be dismissive. It would be saying, your most intimate beliefs are a sham, a defense mechanism, a way to pretend you have won a battle you actually lost many years ago. I want to tell her "You are in therapy because you can't accept that loss," but, of course, telling her that would be useless. My job is to get her to be able to tolerate the loss in her relationship with me.

In my phrasing of it above (my language), I'm the authority, and thus the conflict is re-enacted between us even when she's not here and I'm just writing about it.

I started today's "entry" dismissing myself--the well known defense against being dismissed by others. By you, my (imagined) readers. If I can't get out of this paradox, how can I expect my patient to do it? I can write here about it and yet I am still its victim. That's why telling her about it is useless. My knowing about it is useless to me.

Or maybe, it isn't because I've managed to write all this.

Not such a great idea.

I wanted to post every day. Or at least every day for more than my first week, so here I am wondering what to say. It's not that I want to post even if I have nothing to say, it's that I know I have something to say but won't know what it is until I try.

Why start a blog about gratitude? Do I have so much to say about it? Probably not. I don't feel a lot of gratitude most of the time. I wanted to post about apps which thank you for using them. That was my original motivation. But that won't be in this post.

Do I have a lot to say about thanking software? Probably not. But I never saw it discussed before and felt someone should. Today, I'm thinking this whole project was not such a great idea.

What's it all about?

What does it mean to be thankful?

Gratitude is an emotion. Like regret or remorse or anger. Or it's an album by several, mostly defunct bands. Or a song by Paul McCartney, or The Beasty Boys, or Danny Elfman.

I am thankful to the Wikipedia disambiguation page for this information. Or so I just wrote. I didn't feel the emotion, though. I didn't send any money to Jimmy Wales. I take it for granted that I can look this stuff up. Information wants to be free. (Wikipedia tells me that Stuart Brand said this to Woz at the first hackers conference in 1984, a year that will live in fictional infamy.)

Around Christmas time, Jimmy Wales usually tries to get us to send him some money by invoking, some would say manipulating, our feeling of gratitude which he thinks might lie dormant in us as we look up things on the internet. Thankfulness can be a fleeting or unconscious emotion and it might need to be called to our attention. Or the fleeting feeling of guilt may arise and quickly be masked by some gratitude so that we like ourselves better. Christmas time is good for this as other sources are attempting to find feelings inside us--guilt or gratitude--for one purpose or another and it can become something of a group effort.

Gratitude, we are told, is a good thing to feel. People keep gratitude journals in which they record what they're thankful for on a daily basis. This, it is hoped. will make them feel more gratitude and thus be better people. I'm not saying it doesn't, though I'm skeptical of this activity. (I'm reminded of the study concluding that the physiological expression of a smile works to make you happier, followed by another study rejecting the first's validity.)

Being thankful can feel good, but for some, it feels bad. It can feel weak or dependent. Saying "thanks" can feel like paying a debt.

Receiving actual gratitude can feel good. Someone thinks of you and you acknowledge your appreciation of their attention. Though you might think others' professed gratitude the setup for asking for something--a favor, your business, or your participation in the wrong end of a scam.

In practice, most expressions of gratitude are pro-forma. They are polite. It's Apu on the Simpsons when he says "Thank you, come again." He says it to everyone, even Bart who has just given him a hard time.

When I was growing up, my mother made me write thank you notes to those who gave me gifts. These were mostly her friends--adults who knew me as an extension of her and had little idea of what I might want (not that they didn't occasionally guess correctly.) "How will they know you even got the gift?" my mother would argue. I could see she had a point there.

Stats.

It says my blog has 7 page views. Are they counting humans or bots? I'd like to thank both, or either. Can you thank a bot? There's no law against it, but unless it's specially designed to recognize being thanked, it's a thankless task.

Who, besides me that is, would code a bot to recognize being thanked? Even I wouldn't do it.

How would it know it was being thanked? It could find the words "thank you" in the text, but that would occur in this very sentence which is a case of mention not use. It could see the quotes around it and ignore it, I suppose. What if I say "much obliged" instead of "thanks?" Do people say that anymore? Or "I appreciate it." I used to work at a place where the salesmen all said that when I'd do something for them (which it was my job to do.) I guess they learn in salesman school that it is more likely to feel sincere than "thanks" which is more expected.

George Burns said, of sincerity, "if you can fake that, you've got it made."

It began with Adam.

Well, I said in the previous post that I didn't start a blog for years but it's not exactly true. I started one several times. What I didn't do was post in them. I started because there were things I wanted to say but when the time came to say them, I suddenly forgot what they were. Or I didn't know how to go about saying them. Or both at once in that I'd try but the harder I tried the less of a grasp I had on my ideas. I began to think that the feeling of having something to say was a delusion--a feeling with no substance behind it. But that might be just another delusion--a counter-feeling with even less substance.

So what changed? I mean, something did because here I am blogging. Yeah, I know it;s not really different at this point. Here I am starting again like before. This may be the last post you see.

But here's the dif. I read something that gave me a new perspective. OK, not so new, but this time I believed it. It was in this interview with Adam Phillips.

. . . a feeling that I really wanted to do something and had a lot to say and I was a blank. It was as though there was nothing inside me, so I could no more write a sentence than I could stand on my head. It was absolutely impossible. No amount of willpower, no amount of resolution, determination, conversation with my friends made it happen. But it was as though, at a certain point, something literally got me to the typewriter, and I started typing.

You can read this as saying there's nothing to do about the blankness so don't even try, but I read this as a reminder to have faith.