For like thirty seconds I was interested in Alan Liu’s The Laws of Cool until I read the synopsis of a presentation he gave on it and decided it wasn’t actually all that insightful, from the sound of it.

God, I want to read something. Maybe tomorrow I bring some reading, though I’m not sure that would look right .

—

I’m really glad I went to the University of Chicago. I feel like it’s busted this thing wide open.

—

I’m bored shitless, still an hour to go.

Definitely dragging. I can’t stop yawning. I’m gonna go straight home and nap after work. Oh wait, I can’t, I guess I’m gonna go straight home and ship stuff, and then nap after work. The key is that there will be a nap… and then a few minutes before bed… and then I’ll be back here again.

uhh

Okay, that’s why I want to be a freelancer and not a full-time employee. I wish I lived in a country that wasn’t so heavily financialized; it’s almost a foreign concept to anyone here that you’d want to have everyone spend less time at work, as a society…

This gig is providing me with a good opportunity to work on my grad school plans and try to research my options. Important faculty members in whom I have great faith say that I should apply to “people, not places,” yet with my limited experience in and knowledge of the entirety of the social sciences, I am lacking criteria for selection, beyond mere fame of a few names I know well and have read and appreciated.

Searching the faculties of the top schools and their (rather thin) descriptions, I have found nearly 80 faculty members that might share my interests and research goals/plans. Am I seriously to survey the publications (in any useful depth) of dozens of academics? Some of us are not independently wealthy and have to spend our weeks making a living…

—

Of course, the people-not-places notion isn’t even applicable outside of academics. If I decide not to be a professor at any point, a degree in garbage collection from Harvard’s janitor is going to be worth more than a Ph.D. from a top scholar at Colorado State. That’s just the way the real world works. So in order to maximize my future viability along all potential career paths, I need to consider prestige and name recognition as well.

Even that isn’t clear, though… Schools like UCLA or NYU seem to hold weight only in their own neighborhoods, and aren’t particularly highly regarded in the private sector in other geographic regions (and sometimes not even in academics in other geographic regions).

—

It seems that before I begin to decide on my schools and plans, I need to consider the following:

– The likelihood I’ll stay in academics vs. likelihood of other employment.
– The half of the country where I think I’ll spend most of my time…
– …or even whether I’ll spend a lot of time out-of-country.

Bleh. Maybe I just make choices at random. Why not?

I think my girlfriend is right, one of my boots wasn’t tanned properly. We’ve already been noticing it off and on the last few days/weeks, and now I’m sitting here at work and the place is beginning to smell… like my left boot. Gack.

I’m gonna put this thing in the dryer or oven or something and let it cook for a while when I get back.

And: There really is an east vs. west coast divide in academics, at least in the social science departments/divisions. Virtually all of the best departments on the east coast employ top faculty from Harvard, Columbia, NYU, and Chicago, with virtually no-one from the west coast, while the west coast departments like UCLA and Berkeley tend to use a lot of people from UC schools, and very few from New York, Boston, or the Philly area — just a couple here and there from the midwest.

Strange. I wonder then, without having first-hand experience or the tools to gain it, nor uninterested opinion from others, what I will be sacrificing/gaining by choosing either?

—

Another half-hour and I’m out.

Right now, every place I can think of, every place on Earth, is the last place on Earth that I want to be. I feel compressed to within an inch of my life. I feel like there is nothing for me anywhere and nowhere for me to turn. I am hollow and past-tense; I am somewhere on the fault line between “giving up on trying to breathe” and “abstracting myself into a whirlwind of destruction.”

—

Something is fundamentally wrong with the way I live and the way I make decisions. Something is fundamentally wrong with me. When I review my life, there are no highlights, only things to try to avoid thinking about. I can’t remember the last time I was carefree, the last time I felt full and alive. Was it as far back as the Summer of 2001? The winter of 1994? The spring of 1991, before all of the badness at West High happened?

Was it as far back as 1986, sitting in the open-ended back yard of my parents’ house with a small black dog, watching butterflies and dragonflies waging war across their tiny front?

I only get one life. How can I spend so much of it feeling as though I’m trying maniacally, pitifully, to hold my atoms together in some sort of cohesion from moment to moment, no time to do anything else?

What do I want?

There is no hope for me but to know myself better.

—

Things about me right now:

– I am homeless.
– I am at best a temp, at worst jobless.
– I have $60,000+ debt, mainly student loans.
– My car is getting old.
– I don’t have a dog or a companion animal of any kind.
– I drink too much.
– I am too old to live with my parents.
– I am too old to live for free with anyone.
– I have worse specimens of these than I used to: computer, car, clothes, body, career, bank account.
– I really, really miss actual winter seasons like happen in Chicago or San Fran or Salt Lake City.
– There is not a single thing I’m looking forward to.
– I’ve lost touch with almost everyone from Chicago.
– You can never go back to your childhood again.
– People who tell you to get over it are heartless and must have hated theirs.

—

The thing that makes me most unhappy in life right now is that I don’t feel like there’s anyone I can be honest with, that I can be myself with. Every time I edge toward openness with anyone, the reaction I get is so obviously negative that I give up and reinternalize everything.

I need to find some place where I belong, both intellectually and emotionally, because I can’t keep internalizing things forever the way I have been for the last I-don’t-know-how-many-years… but until I find such a place, I can’t just cut loose and “be me” because a person who’s absolutely alone in the world — or worse, has a world full of enemies — is in serious emotional trouble, too.

Sometimes people are so different from you that they can’t understand a single point you’re making, nor can they even begin to fathom the ways in which the things that they do actually affect you. By some odd paradox, they instead believe that they understand you in other, sometimes even more complex or subtle ways, but without ever coming close to knowing or accepting how you feel. The things that they are able to see in you are circumscribed by their own reality; they project, they misconstrue, they distort, and in so doing expend an incredible amount of energy, far more than would be required to simply understand, were they capable of doing so.

Somestimes your reality is just bigger than other peoples’ realities, not because you’re smarter or better, but because you’re less normal or more experienced, or whatever. It’s one of those classic judgments that is so loaded that people hate to make it, but it happens.

You can definitely understand other people inside and out without their ever having a clue about you. And if that happens to too many relationships in your life, it’s fucking exhausting.

—

l i f e = b i t t e r . s w e e t

l o t s . a n d . l o t s . o f . r e a l l y . b i t t e r

a . l i t t l e . b i t . o f . e v e n . m o r e . i n t e n s e . s w e e t

I can never figure out whether having an online diary compresses or elongates my life, or whether it is an isolating force or a communalizing force for me. But here it is.

Life right now (and indeed, I suspect, for this entire year) is going to be very odd, very ephemeral, very accidental. That’ll make nearly two years in a row by the time Fall ’06 hits that I’ve been essentially a leaf in wind, my life being decided by outside forces.

After that, I’m taking life by the reins and will be willing my way to a tenured, respectable, financially stable middle age, and beyond that, a book-laden, smoky, whisky-friendly old age.

Yup, I can already see it down the road, and it feels familiar and warm.

All the jobs that matter are in DC and NY.

The serious job hunt, which is something I haven’t really done for a few years, has brought home to me once again just how much of our culture is bound up in cash (i.e. money, moolah, dollars). 95% of all jobs are explicitly about the movement of money, nothing more, nothing less! Banking, investing, accounting, insurance, marketing, sales, real estate, health maintenance organizations, manufacturing, consulting, shipping, auditing, staffing, blah, blah, blah… more than 50% of the duties associated with jobs in any of these industries (and in most cases, more than 90%) are basically just worrying all the time about the bottom line and adding columns of numbers up.

There are only actually two jobs in America: money manager (95% of the population) and nonprofit/education hippie (5% of the population).

My question is: if only 5% of the labor in this country is real (i.e. exists outside of money, which is supposed to simply be a marker of exchange value ultimately based in goods or labor) then what exactly is the other 95% (all of that fucking money) referring to/based on/representing?

Is the whole thing just a bubble? I mean, yes there are goods here and there, but these days goods are just markers of value referring ultimately to exchanges of money, not vice-versa; it is the goods that are temporary, shifting, transient, symbolic; it is the money that’s real, that occupies both thought and expression. Reality seems to have been inverted?!

I thought I understood economics, I mean I have an M.A. and everything, I’ve read Marx and Keynes and Schumpeter, but maybe I just never took a step back and looked at it in the concrete sense before. There is no labor economy, there is no goods economy. There is only a cash economy; we pay each other to move each others’ money around between ourselves; we spend money to facilitate the spending and earning of money; we build things to represent the money that underpins them; we use money to make or lose money. Then we come home and eat and go to bed. As far as I can tell right now, that’s the only real thing any American does: eat (and, I suppose, shit).

The rest is all just shuffling and shifting money, like a decks of cards used for endless card tricks!

I suddenly feel insane.

The Condi Rice confirmation hearings have been the entertainment of the day. And shows like Chris Matthews’ Hardball have been more entertaining still, as he basically shows that as all of these Senators are busy making Dr. Rice out to be the glazed donut hole that she is, they’re just as dysfunctional and disconnected from any modicum of common sense.

I soooooo wish I had a transcript of tonight’s Hardball episode. Maybe I’ll get it later and fix this post up with the actual quotes, but in the meantime, here’s the gist from my excellent (if I do say so myself) memory. Yes, it was this bad, and probably even worse if I had the actual words. These people looked like they’d be in over their heads on a visit the local Krispy Kreme.

—

(…begin “wish I had a transcript, but here’s the gist I remember” recount…)

Chris Matthews: “So senator, your sources, generals on the ground, are telling you that we only have 4,000 Iraqi solidiers ready to go, ready to replace U.S. soldiers, max. But Condi Rice just testified that there are 120,000 Iraqi soldiers ready to go. That’s quite a gulf.”
Sen. Biden (D) Delaware: “Oh, Chris, we have nowhere near 120,000 soldiers ready to go. These are serious generals sent to Iraq by Washington to get a job done. What reason do they have to lie? They’ve been telling us that this isn’t working. Dr. Rice’s numbers are obviously very wrong.”

(…some back and forth along these same lines, Condi’s 120,000 vs. the real 4,000 or less, and then…)

Chris Matthews: “So, Senator, now that you’ve made your case that Condi’s numbers are basically cooked, are you going to vote to confirm Condi Rice?”
Sen. Biden (D) Delaware, after just having made Condi out to be the biggest liar in history: “Yes, Chris, I am.”

(…then, later, with Senator Hutchinson of Texas…)

Chris Matthews: “Senator, why did we invade Iraq? What did Iraq do to us?”
Sen. Hutchinson (R) Texas: “Chris, nine-one-one happened. The terrorists must be stopped.”
Chris Matthews: “No, Senator, not the terrorists, what did the people of Iraq do to us?”
Sen. Hutchinson (R) Texas: “They, in concert with other terrorist organizations, invaded our country.”
Chris Matthews: “The people of Iraq, Senator?”
Sen. Hutchinson (R) Texas: “They and other terrorist organizations–“
Chris Matthews, cutting her off: “The people of Iraq did this, Senator? The nation of Iraq invaded us?”
Sen. Hutchinson (R) Texas: “Chris, they’re terrorists and they have tentacles all over the world. They must be stopped.”

(…and a bit later, on needing Iraqi security forces to eventually replace U.S. forces if we’re ever to get out of there…)

Chris Matthews: “Senator, what makes you think the Iraqis are going to help us out?”
Sen. Hutchinson (R) Texas: “Because, Chris, with the help of the Iraqi people we can do it.”
Chris Matthews: “But what makes you think the Iraqi’s will help you?”
Sen. Hutchinson (R) Texas: “Because, Chris, with the help of the Iraqis it can be done.”
Chris Matthews: “But why do you think the Iraqi’s going to help us? What evidence do you have? What if they don’t want to help us? How do you know they’ll help us?”
Sen. Hutchinson (R) Texas: “Chris, they’ll help us because when we get their help we can give them elections that, with their help, will be a starting point. Not much, but with their help and cooperationa starting point.”

—

…God, I gotta get a transcript of this show, for comedic value. These are our representatives, ladies and gentlemen. They’re the smart ones who are going to save us from Bush and the neocons… right?

I think I have just come up with the basic framework for my dissertaton argument. It’s something I’ve been grappling with for a few months now, and it all just came to me, pouring out through the keyboard. Now I just have to get down to cases… methodology and the nitty gritty and all that sort of thing.

But at least now I know what I’m looking at and can begin to figure out what programs and what people look best to me. Excellent. Good. Cool.

Still no job. Still in personal and financial turmoil. But at least feeling as though I’m marginally productive. Hoopla.

—

Note to the people offering internships: I don’t appreciate your making it more difficult for me to sort through internship listings. Basically, yes, I’m interested in an internship, but only a paid internship. I am not wealthy. Offering $100.00 a month for “expenses” in D.C. just to make it into the “paid internships” category does not make me any more likely to take you up on your offer, it just makes the search more difficult for me.

You might as well just offer $0.01 for nine months and call that a “paid” internship. Hell, let’s do away with the category all together so that you don’t have to admit that you’re different from internships that actually support people. Hell, force them to look at you, right?

Maybe it’s time for new categories: “Minimum Living Wage” Internships and “Volunteer” Internships. At least then the categories would be marginally helpful to seekers.

For a couple of weeks now since returning to Santa Barbara, I have applied for anything and everything in sight in SoCal, NoCal, NYC, DC, Norfolk, Portland, SLC, Baltimore, and a dozen other places. But now the 1Q slump has hit; there are virtually no new listings anywhere since last week… not on Craigslist, not on Monster.com, not in the paper… There is nothing to do today that feels productive.

It’s a sort of queasy feeling just sitting here with no activity hoping that something good will land on my head, but guessing that it won’t.

Things are tough right now. Really tough. I mean, I think my chances of landing a teaching position are excellent (I’m supremely confident) but such a position won’t actually kick in until fall of this year. What, exactly, will I do until then? It’s not like I can take another serious job if I’m just going to leave it for another one in a moment. But a non-serious job won’t pay my bills.

It’s not like I can find a job right now anyway, especially in this town.

But I’m broke now. I have bills now. I’m sitting alone in someone else’s house not knowing how I’m going to support myself now… I don’t have the luxury of being able to simply hang around and wait until fall. The crazy thing is, I’m leaving anyway in just a few months. Long before I reach fall, I’ll be alone. This living situation will disappear, and my girlfriend will leave me for months to my own devices, while I have to cope with these problems alone. I’ll have to leave but I’ll have nowhere to go, no way to earn, nothing to do, and no idea how to get by or where to have my mail sent. And in the meantime, I’m determined just to sit here and wait for it, it seems.

Yes, I’m an idiot. The score is in.

Well… I knew it was coming. I just didn’t know it would come before I got even one (1) legitimate call in response to my resume (apart from staffing agencies). What I’m talking about are employment scams. Put your resume and email address out there on a hundred job sites where these things are publicly searchable and you’re bound to get people digesting the data and sending out emails that say:

“Dear Mr. Hsiao, I saw your resume on Monster.com and want to schedule an interview immediately for Dean of Admissions, University; we believe that your qualifications and experience are ideal for the position and your starting salary would be grade II-a, which is $68,535 per annum to start, with full benefits. Should the interview go well, as we expect it will, you can begin the one-week training and orientation as soon as you are available; you will begin the following week. Please note that this one-week training and orientation for Deanships will have a minimal one-time fee of $1000, which offsets expenses that we incur which are no longer funded by federal education grants. The fee is payable simply by replying to this email and providing your credit card number. We will provide you with details on available training and orientation sessions and their locations once we have received your payment.”

I don’t know why it’s so depressing, but it is. I just want to work.