The Private Professor
I’ve taken my anti-social behavior to a new extreme this year. Here in New Orleans, I have no friends. I mean this with all sincerity. The only social activity I engage in is a weekly trip to the super market. Aside from that, I speak out in class. That’s it.
This state of affairs has not made me all that happy. While never a social butterfly, I been known to go goofing around with pals, hooping some hoops, talking some politics, philosophy, drinking some brews and snuggling with my lady love. So why then am I incapable of relaxing and engaging in social activities with the people around me?
The superficial answer is I don’t like them. And as answers go, it's pretty much true. But why? They aren’t bad, or stupid, or anything. They just don’t interest me.
I think back to the friends I did make here in the big easy (who have subsequently left), and the friends I have kept through out life. The shared trait among them is the critical stance from which they address their life: whether it be a struggle with love, a career, the freedom of their will, or a discovered truth and all it's horrors, they typically express a deep seated frustration with some component of their being. This honest attempt to assess life makes for some interesting conversation, and more importantly a substantial exchange of ideas…see for example the great exchange about “pathos” and the meaning of art between the old robot town gang last summer. That was nice.
My frustration with "people as acquaintances" is the pointless discourse. I don’t mean that these people are stupid…I meet plenty of people smarter than me, who talk smarter than me. I mean the conversations with them are trivial. Shallow. In Holden’s terms “phoney”.
Given the freedom to do anything, discuss anything, experience anything…drugs, sex, art, love, violence, hatred, literature, math,-- They join up to focus upon silly music, silly t.v. shows, and silly jokes, pointless distinctions, and pointless grades. Their critical beef with the world is on the level of fashion and approval…they innovate and worry about new hairstyles, tattoos, and piercings, and intellectually spout some clichéd party line about music, art, politics and philosophy. I actually meet people who support both Nietzsche and Chomsky (the political Chomsky)… Why? Because both are sexy, controversial thinkers. Does it matter that they present diametrically opposed world views? No, because philosophy is an interesting game to them, not a thing to be processed or lived. When I sat through lunch with a group of my peers, I felt sick. It wasn't the food.
I am interested in the person who has trouble making sense of things. Who works through their confusion and attempts solutions. Failing that, I am interested in the religious, nationalist, militant fanatic—the person who, comfortable with their beliefs, is uncomfortable with the world. And struggles with trying to reshape it. They at least are interesting…and frightening. They at least merit a response.
The worst is a room of pansies. A room of guys and gals who think a fist fight is a significant event. A room of guys and gals who might gasp at a comment. A group who worries about divergences in tastes…not because they might be missing something important in a work of art (a legitimate worry), but because they want to be re-affirmed of the importance of their unexamined judgments. There is something repulsive in the typical academic’s stance of irony, of detachment. A real disinterest would be fine, but then why all the interest? Why all the concern? Why the pansyness?
It’s saddening to me because I think people really are fascinating. Even the biggest douche-bag is a being of wonder. The problem is you never get to that. All you get to is the same bland offerings: Either a friendly banter of self-congragulary agreements and jokes, or a petty contest disguised as "kidding". The friendly banter is fine. Again I will happily goof off for a few minutes. But the real comedy gold never comes from the clowns. Only the people I actually know seem funny. And the petty contests can just suck a nut. I am as badass a fellow as I am going to meet. I don’t need a “whose smarter” competition or an arm wrestling match to affirm who I am. Social engagements that involve an element of one-up-man-ship and showmanship are boring…the stakes are too low. It’s like a game of putt-putt… so a guy proves to be better at putt-putt, but who should be ashamed—the guy who wins at putt-putt, or the guy who loses? Answer: The dorks who insist on playing.
I am just too damn bored with the environment of a flippant crowd of strangers/acquaintances. Like a NASCAR event, the problem is too deep to fix by being a clown about it—I’d rather just avoid the loudness.
My angst has not brought me joy. I’d like to proclaim that my uber-teen wisdom has blossomed into a great contentment. It hasn't. I'd prefer social discussions of science and all its new flavors. A good hemming hawing about a dandy of a puzzle. I like to talk about topics of interests with people of interest with beers of interest. It just ain’t happening here.
Don't talk of dust and roses
Or should we powder our noses?
Don't live for last year's capers
Give me steel, give me steel, give me pulses unreal
-David Bowie
Woe is the Professor. Woe is my Passion
posted by Old Stallion at 6:46 PM
5 Comments:
Reading that post makes me happy; it's good to know that I'm not the only bastard out there who finds nearly everyone else in the world boring. It's how I feel here, except that St. Louis is an even less interesting place to be than The Big Easy.
I am really fucking bored with people too. I agree that people are fascinating, but it is very difficult to get to that part of them. I'm sitting here alone drinking Schlitz at home, instead of at the bar, because of this fact. It seems like the older I get, the more set in their ways my friends get. I just want to experience something new. Let's get drunk on top of a railroad car instead of your couch, dude. Let's, at least, talk about something different. I know that a lot of the blame rests on my own shoulders. I'm keeping myself as comfortable as everyone else. On the other hand, it is hard to find good people to hang out with.
This is obviously why all of you should move down to Austin and be our friends. The general populous is not more interesting or raw than the people in New Orleans, St. Louis or Lincoln, but if you all move down here we will have a critical mass of good conversationalists! Then we can begin to change the world for the better by gradually inducting promising folks into our ranks. Also the weather is nice here and there are lots of things to do. Just keep it in mind.
Let's get drunk on a couch on top of a moving railroad car! Another excellent post, Professor Romance.
oh wait, I do.
The only conversations I have that hold my attention for even a fraction of a second are with my students, which is why when all of us posting these messages get together any "reporting" on interesting shit I've heard usually involves them. This is funny, since these are the people "beneath" me that I'm supposed to suffer through in order to have the enlightening conversations with the other pre-professors and academic elite who are "above" me. The problems is: those people are usually retarded or douchebags. And by "retarded," I mean that the fundamental socio-economic privilege that allowed them to enter the hermetic (and otherwise poverty inducing) womb of academia has made them so detached from day to day reality
(or, at least, my family's day to day reality) that they might as well be another species. And by "douchebags," I mean that they are douchebaggy. Contagious douche spillage. Even when you are included in their ranks or convesations, you cannot help but feel like you are in the midst of an artificial dialogue directlty at a mysterious, unknown, and judging audience. It's what reality-TV contestants must feel like. And it's dumb.
The most decent people I've found are merely aspiring members of the upper middle class, who have no real intellectual curiosity outside of what they are professinally required to feign in order to hope for tenure-ship at some podunk university. And even though we are friends, I don't really have much in common with them or their desired lifestyle. As a result, and as they've picked up on, they probably won't be any part of my life in 10 years.
It's a system of diminishing returns: when I was twenty, if I went out with 20 people, I found one interesting. When I was twenty-five, it was one for 50. Now it's one for every 100 or so, and I'm tired of drinking and chit-chat. So instead I try to write enough in order to worry about whether I'm writing enough to eventually keep my family in rent and food.
In any event, the geography riddle should be solved at some point.
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