2008-12-04
I'm setting up an external blog for no other reason than I'm bored and I want an excuse for not writing fiction.
The other night (Monday, 01 December) I was rather inebriated. Intoxicated, you might say, with my success. I killed a few minutes telling the world about it and I must apologize to some of you. I was letting off some of the stress that had been building over the long summer. I wrote my doctoral thesis and it was published, paving the way for my dissertation and public defense of that same article.
Upon getting published I experienced an ominous calm, a dreadful silence really. Thankfully, having spent much of my adult life posting unwanted (and often unpopular) erotic fiction to sites like SOL, I'm used to getting little or no feedback. It seems, however, that unlike ham-fisted perverts who are simply too lazy to offer commentary, academics simply read slower. Doubtless they jerked off, sitting on their toilets with the latest professional journal quivering in their excited fingers as they pumped and pulled and otherwise rendered critical judgment on my life's work (to date)...And then they called and emailed and offered me opinion, fact, and irrelevant supposition. I was praised and flamed, often in the same breath, and it was quite an experience. Joan of Arc? Maybe not, but the allusion pleases me to no end. We all want to be martyrs for our beliefs.
When they said "...first week of December." I didn't know they meant the first goddamn day in December!
That hurt quite a lot, which was perhaps their intention, I'm not sure. I'm not usually so cynical. I lectured for a little over an hour and then fell back into a defensive posture I like to call "Stalingrad." It was cold and bloody and by the end of it we were all speaking German. Historical metaphors rarely make sense, so I don't even try. Somehow, by the end of a very long day with breaks for lunch, tea, and the occasional vomiting session in the restroom, I was deemed worthy of the honorific title "Doctor" and I shall be vested in mid-January. Myself and a number of others, live and on-stage before a captive audience just returned from the holidays and in hardly any sort of mood to clap politely and offer congratulations around a large bowl of meager punch.
Life continues. I continue. And I never really believed I would reach this point in my life. At one time it was the only thing I wanted. The goal that quite literally kept me alive. When I had no other reason, I had this, and now it really is mine. It begs the question that should have been asked, but never was...What am I supposed to do now?
rache
