Academic work

Yesterday, my stomach was going crazy. That was not because I was nervous (or not only). I have a very few litres of blood left in my body. Not many. I felt like: I will come to your house and suck your blood. That was not a good condition for trying to stay focused in an academic seminar. My head was a blank and my stomach was waging a war of its own. I tried to respond to questions. Everything I said came out infinitely lame. I felt like an ass. Even though all of the questions were hugely relevant, I was simply not able to connect to them properly. Frustration. Worry. Most of all: Vanity.

After the seminar, I wondered, as I always do, why the hell I am working within this field. I'm not qualified. I'm not interested in philosophy. I'm stupid. I start to imagine occupations I would be more suited for. My attitudes towards other forms of work ("something easy") become embarrasingly evident and having that thrown in my face makes me instantaneously drop the thought. I am surprised to find this tendency in myself. Here I am, immersed in the thought that a job or an activity contains standards completely external to what sense I see in it. Standards! Damn it, when I actually do philosophy, while I am not bitching to myself about it, this is something I try to look upon critically.

During that moment at the seminar, I was inclined to think that I have no clue whatsoever about what a philosophical question is. It simply falls out of my hands. And it goes on like this for a few hours of soul-searching when everything appears futile, the most futile of it all being my own philosophical work. Fluff. Losing the perspective of the importantance or relevance of what one is doing is scary. It happens to me often. I wonder whether it happens to other people, too. I mean, it's one thing that one starts to see that one is mistaken about certain things. That one has not given enough thought to some issues. An altogether different situation is feeling completely at a loss in regard to an entire activity.

What did I do? At the bar, I listened to a conversation about violence, RAF and Gandhi. I was even more morose. I didn't know what to think. I shut up and I shut in. Are there circumstances under which violence is justified? Hell, I don't know. I don't know I don't know. Should I know? Is it just that I don't have the guts or the moral energy to mull this over - seriously? Here I am, sitting in a pub with a sore stomach, thinking about the prospect of violence. I felt immensly detached from the question and I did not know whether the reason was my laziness or that the question itself had a weird setting. I thought about something S wrote. We don't know which situations we will be confronted will. We don't know what shape our lives will take. We don't know what life will make us into. It's stupid and senseless to pose questions such as "are you for or against violence" or "are you for or against sex". For or against what?

What did I do? I tried the ancient trick. Two painkillers. Beer on empty stomach. Vodka, too. I wobbled home somehow and the morning air did not smell like anything and maybe it was raining, maybe not. I fell asleep in my chair.

It helped. Today I have regained the conviction that I need to write this fucking paper and that it might not be such an impossible thing to do. The comments I received yesterday help a great deal, now that I am actually able to digest them (stomach references intended). Too bad I can't read the scribbled notes because my handwriting is shite.