Unable to sleep because of a late coffee shot mixed with anti-histamines buzz, I began the day around 6 am and have been working since, save one small nap and a friendly lunch. Although much has been accomplished, especially in terms of reading and cognizing the trajectory of my 3010 course, the day does not feel particularly productive simply because no writing has been done. The avalanche of minutiae buried me in the shock/awe of its immediacy, leaving the more important destination cloudy in its aftermath.
    My overeager side, powerfully addicted to the rush of accomplishment, urges me to consciously create an unbendable writing space. Although I have dedicated myself to writing a certain amount each day, the objective does not yet have structural support in my life/time table. Creating such a space will invoke a second major lesson, saying ‘no.’ Again, it is the minutiae that will interfere here, clouding time-space so that finishing another 50 pages of X text become more important than cultivating a disciplined perseverance in writing.

    Writing is such an intimate space invested with a tremendous emotional energy that it does not yield to critique easily. Robert Aguirre’s opening talk in combination with “time management” advice demonstrated the need to override a “task finished” mentality with one that peacefully coexists with the “in progress/ draft.” The former is particularly symptomatic of my attitude toward writing, which does not allow for revision or reexamination once the first full document is produced; it is simply finished. I am striving toward the latter, to methodically, peacefully, inch toward an ever evolving document that only finds its end in a pre-established goal: ‘possible for conference’, ‘work up toward Masters’, or simply ‘cultivate intellectual ability to keep A,B,C in focus while using them to alter X theory and Y field’.
    Aguirre’s main lesson for me that day, however, was that to be a scholar is to be sadistically addicted to feedback. He shared a story in which a professor’s manuscript was utterly demolished in a workshop, but her reaction was of tremendous gratitude. That scholar, in the language of this post, envisions her work as continually evolving draft, albeit one that has been in progress for over eight years. Imagining the emotional investment in such extended projects opened a space that allowed me to see the relative casualness of semester long projects; being playful and exploratory, voicing idiocy to get corrected, taking risks that drive toward the extraordinary should be constitutive of this experience. Obviously, I’m an idealist. However, it seems to me that such willingness to play calluses the spots scholars will need in order to bear the bruises of critique with gratitude.