Saturday, June 12, 2021

Things to do when I grow up

1. Have friends over to watch tennis.  I don't watch now but I used to love watching tennis, I mean, I could watch the sport professionally, all day, all night, for a living.  If I have like a family living setup someday, and we get bored, it might be nice to have house "parties" to watch tennis.  Although instead of hosting properly I'd be that fanatic focused on the screen.  Friends, be warned.   

2. Study young people.  The only thing my papa wants me to do as much as he wants me to marry (and have babies and live happily ever after) is to, like he sometimes says it, complete my PhD.  To which I sometimes say he should feel free to go do one himself, leave my matter alone.  
😅 😁
I would like to do a PhD but I still don't know in what.  I like everything, I mean, is it maths-of-like-physics I should do, or like philosophy itself, or like literature and language, with a bit of history and like psychology, or something else in applied maths with like economics or engineering - sort of the obvious choice if you consider what I studied in my Bachelors Degree and PhD attempt - or what?  

I can't commit, I can't "forsake all others" to "marry" one thing in a PhD program, and I always want more freedom, and I just hate how the pursuit of a PhD requires extreme limitation for a long stretch of time.  What if I want to care about something else, while I've already started...I mean, that level of sustained focus on one really little thing is not my taste.  

  And I was speaking with a friend yesterday - my friend is 10+ years younger and I was hearing from him interesting things about dating-and-sex culture today - and after we talked it occurred to me that another PhD option, but a more specific one, would be to answer a sub-question of the question: What are the kids doing online.  To be honest, and if you know me you won't be surprised here, the idea first came to me as something to suggest to him, as what he might like to do now, to study contemporary "culture" in one of these academic -ologies.  

I've long cared about young people, age twenty-ish, and I tend to honour and revere their way, their tentative, inventive way, maybe even more than I respect "normal" adult people.   
Now again if you know anything about me, you know to not look for my thesis just yet, or even my university enrolment.  You know that my interest will change, it will change even today.  You know that I'm only saying that a possibility, for when I'm like sixty years old or something, if I haven't decided on something to study #alltheway by then, and after I've had all the careers and the writings, and the lives that I need to live, and maybe after I've ruled out more of the professions and the studies and the new things I could embark on, ... that maybe I'll stumble upon a structured, academic, anthropology or sociology gig and decide to do something research-wise about the culture of late adolescents or something.  I also recently considered (I forget what it's called) the thing where you just take a lot of notes about animals.  I thought maybe lizards.  
So, hey, I'm a work in progress, permanently under construction, and all that.  
Did I mention that I love astrology?  And my astrology in part can be read precisely as 'though possibly obsessed with and yet ambivalent/wishy-washy about highest-level-higher ed, that tendency may lie unseen beneath the surface, and this may be a late bloomer who may in fact get a late-life PhD'  

Although instead of PhDs and higher education, the area of interest could be esoterica and seeking, in-depth studies, radical new truly new barely-known foreign knowledge codes and philosophies, deep dedication to a truly new, yet to be appreciated, definitely yet to be exploited at all, cult of method in computing for instance, or highly immersive foreign travel...but for now I'm not like that at all.  Oh I am like that a bit.  Hmmm, I am like that and maybe it's more than a bit.  

Anyway, for now, and this is shown separately and emphatically in my astrology, I like surface knowledge or information or communication, and in what manner? With diversity/wide-range, strength, purpose, enjoyment, and possible profusion.  A delightful teacher too.  In my case, everything about elementary knowledge and information - words in the news and in songs and in books, popular or good or usable ideas, all the subjects in a university or in the library, but not the ones that lie undiscovered to scholars - that is where I spend my time.  In my case, I'm not today a busy talker, or texter, or even writer-of-many-words, actually a writer of few words :-) but perhaps a reader of many more words.    

And for now I may be more knowledge-finder than seeeeker.

More things to do when I grow up:  
3. Definitely cruise.  Post-coronavirus get on a ship with a lot of people and a lot of germs, yeah Baby!   When I picture my good life, yes, it's on a trip on a ship and I'm standing alone enjoying some quiet and a view.  I am old (by 20th-century standard) but life is youthful-good.  Cheers.    

Advertisement: Read my books.

1 comment:

t said...

'though possibly obsessed with and...'
a simpler possibility is to recognize that psychoanalysis itself is the career, that is, not 'obsession with higher ed' but 'higher-ed about obsession'?
I came to this idea by learning a new concept in astrology.