Partly because I am no longer sure what I want to vent about these days. It seems that all the bile and vitriol has been squeezed out of me by all the wonderfulness that is time spent with J. Sheeeesh, I'm becoming domesticated! The tropical flower was right, I've turned into a docile lamb :-p Frankly, I'm not sure I would like it any other way..hehehe..just be happy that I do not spend hours composing paeans to his eyes, or his lovely long eyelashes or something of the sort *shudder* I'm not sure I'd like things to get _that_ far gone...
Aaaaaaaaaaand in other news, I've recently been wondering what the hell I am doing at OSU. Putting aside almost-end-of-quarter jitters, I have been wondering what exactly I'm gaining from being here for this year that Kasulis is off on sabbatical doing buddha knows what in Japan (the lucky bastard). I suppose that learning Japanese counts for a lot of it but somehow I feel that I am wasting time, I keep feeling this irritating itch between my shoulderblades that one day I will wake up and realise that I have a MA in nothing in particular and that I am eminently unemployable. I feel like I should be reading other books, and writing other papers, and attending conferences in other places and talking about subjects other than 710, tantra or how much we all hate Julianna and want to choke her with her own blood art.
WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING HERE?????
I don't even know what I'm going to do for my thesis...I know that no-one really knows but I'm beginning to question the very basis of why I am interested in Buddhism and the value of the work that I have done with it so far. I keep asking myself Erin's question, "So what?" Why does my interest in the philosophy of Zen matter? I thought I knew the answer to that question but not any more....I read work like Hugh's and I think to myself that I should be lucky to be doing work that's half as important or relevant...I mean who really cares that Dogen and Derrida might as well have been buddy monks in the 1200's? How does my interest in that change one thing about the shitty world that we live in? What's the relevance? So what? It all seems like so much intellectual masturbation now! How can I do something that really matters about Buddhism? More to the point, how do I do it with the little Japanese that I know now? What a lot of time I've wasted in the last year!! I could potentially be in my second year of Japanese by now...but that's in the past now, there's nothing I can do about that, but I can do something about the future and what's left of the present..whatever that really means! *snort*
Sitting in the bus today, dripping wet from the late autumn rains I was struck by how unreal it felt to me...in the past, I've felt that being on a bus, commuting to school connected me in some way to "real" life. As if stepping on that bus somehow brought me into a world that was larger than my own. It just brought home to me how disconnected my life feels from anything that I would consider "real". I feel like I have been living in a bubble, or some kind of dream from which I might wake at any moment.
Horror of horrors, perhaps I have it all backwards, and the "real" has seeped into my dream without my noticing it...I mean, it seems real enough to me; paying bills, counting my pennies, wondering what to cook for dinner...that's real isn't it? *sigh*
I just keep wanting to look over my shoulder, as if to give myself some warning as to when that wakeup call will come hurtling down on me.
I hope I won't bruise too badly when it does...
posted by WM @ 20:18
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