Man is a Desiring Machine.

I am sitting here on hold with the state of California and I am going over some of my notes from last week’s Critical Theories of Literature class. The notes themselves are not terribly interesting unless you’re super into Psychoanalytic Criticism. However the bits scrawled in the margins are kind of fun (not all of the lecture is actually useful for studying later, but I like to keep ahold of the tangential bits that are interesting):

- A German saying I learned:

“Love is home-sickness”

- Something that Edgar Allan Poe apparently said:

“Man is a desiring machine.”

- Something my professor said:

“If I had had that experience than I would have an even stranger sense of myself that I do now …”

- You would not believe how much Freudian Psychoanalytic Criticism deals with the notion of castration (male children are afraid their fathers with castrate them, female children believe they have already been castrated, fear of castration is sublimated into the unconscious, “The Uncanny” is just the return in disguise of the repressed “Castration Complex”, etc. etc. etc.) and so in the margin of my notes I apparently wrote: Do I really need shorthand for Castration?! And below that are a few attempts at inventing shorthand symbols.

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Shaft.

My Pandora is playing the theme song from Shaft right now.

That’s cool and everything, but just a little weird for a Tuesday, right?

Um, and now it has hopped over to “All I Need” off of Radiohead’s In Rainbows album.

I think my Pandora is having a nervous breakdown or something.



P.S.
Is it weird how many blog entries I write about my Pandora? Does it make me like some crazy old lady who has a joint Facebook account with her cat?


P.P.S
You just gotta understand that I listen to it ALL DAY at work, so it is almost like having some companionship and after awhile it does kind of seem like it takes on a personality. Though, I guess, since that personality is one that you have programmed to mirror your own preferences, it is kind of like I spend all day with an externalized version of myself. I supposed that Freud would find something deeply troubling about this.

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Sad Excuses for my Absenteeism.

Oh dear blog, how I have missed you. I’m sorry that I have been away for so long. I am not mad at you and I did not forget about you.

The truth is that I just haven’t been feeling zesty and zany enough for you lately. I have just been sort of emotionally exhausted as of late. So I have turned somewhat inward. I have been reading a lot and I have been doing a lot of research for the story that I’m working on.

The book I’m reading right now is called “Drood” by Dan Simmons and it is a novel that seems to be about how Charles Dickens went all crazy during the last years of his life. It is dark and very interesting so far. Strangely, as I’m reading it, I keep picturing my Dad as Charles Dickens. That’s weird, right? My father doesn’t really look much like Dickens and as far as I know there isn’t any Freudian significance to this. I have gone as far as to google image Charles Dickens just so I have a better idea of what he looked like, but it still doesn’t seem to be helping. I have to say that, thus far, my emotional experience with the novel is probably far removed from what the author had hoped for.

Otherwise, I have been on a financial adventure.

You see, I have worked out this beautiful little personal budget in Excel. It is simple and elegant and reasonable. I gave myself January and February to cram my life into it, but alas, some things went haywire and I couldn’t do it. So I christened March “No Money-Spending March” so that I could get a better handle on everything and be perfectly on budget by the beginning of April. This has been interesting and I encourage everyone to give this sort of thing a try because it really does give you a clear idea of what you spend money on and what you don’t. See, if you limit yourself to purchasing the bare essentials required to get through life, you start to realize how much you normally spend money on that which is frivolous. And in doing so, you develop a profile of yourself as a person and as a consumer.

For instance, in this month of austerity I have spent exactly as much on fishing supplies as I normally do, which is to say, absolutely nothing. Ergo: I am not a fisherman or fishing enthusiast. If it was ever unclear before, I now know that about myself.

However, I have had to curb my purchasing of books and cool clothes from the Goodwill. Which means that I like owning books and cool clothes that were previously worn by strangers who are probably now dead.

Also, I have stopped myself several times from buying weird food at Trader Joe’s. Instead, I have been raiding the freezer and actually eating the weird food that I had previously purchased from Trader Joe’s. This tells me that I - like so many others - am afflicted with what psychiatrists call “Trader Joe’s Blindness”. The shrinks say that when confronted with all the strange and delightful stuff that Trader Joe’s sells, we often forget our own eating habits and purchase odd and obscure types of fish or couscous that we would normally never consider consuming. For instance, why did I previously buy two different kinds of eggplant parmesan lasagna when I have always preferred regular lasagna? I have no good answer except for the “Trader Joe’s Blindness” which caused me to become schizophrenically separated from my awareness of my own eating habits.

I should also mention about “No Money-Spending March” this is not an endeavor that I am setting off on because I am necessarily broke, but rather, because I am trying to bring some kind of budgetary order to my life. I have spent a lot of life being very broke and I am not that way right now (I don’t have a bathtub full of razor sharp $100 bills either though) but I’ve gotten to the age when not having any real savings is embarrassing. So I figure I should get to work on that.

That is pretty much it for me lately. Just feeling sort of introverted, confusing my father with 19th century novelists and not spending any money.

Maybe my life has been too lame lately to be blogging about.

Though that has never stopped me before …


BTW, here is a pic of my Dad




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