giving up

I can't do it anymore. I give up.

The demands of kids and work are too much and I fail at both. I'm getting nothing done and more and more calls and pressures and demands for something. Stupid stuff like 'a synopsis for the marketing people, the catalog' and 'just one more pass through' and 'an additional bibliography' and 'find a reviewer for this one' adds up; when each takes at least an hour, where can I take the hour from? Even friends are too much to bear: here, just read this one thing; or, when you have an extra hour, take a look at this. WTF? Extra hour?

Last week: I'm 10 minutes late picking up a kid from a party--the last parent there. My kid in front of the building in the dark, waiting, while the host parent keeps asking where I am. This week: in and out of meetings to a get a kid to soccer. 3 minutes after I've dropped him off, practice is canceled. Someone else, annoyed, brings him home. But I'm in a meeting--which also means I can't make some informational session on advanced math at the middle school. Yesterday: I scramble to get dinner together so that the kids can eat between 6:30 and 7:00--the time gap between practices and rehearsals. I get a call at 6:20--there's pizza. We'll eat here. Then ten minutes later: can you bring money for the pizza?

My fourth grade daughter wanted to walk home from school. It's a half day. 45 minutes after school was out, she wasn't here. I panicked. But only really lost it after she showed up.

Comments

[Dominic]

Sounds like you need a wife.

[patrick j. mullins]

This is interesting, because like Christian this morning, who has outlined to what degree how busy he is, and how he has 15 minutes twice a week disrupted by his baby daughter in order to read the new text. Then the book is praised as 'amazingly rich' and how he 'is looking forward to the fantastic but difficult' editing, without a single specific reference to anything in the book. He asks me not to panic that he has no time for our book project that has to be published, as agreed, by mid-2009. And so I write him back and tell him his self-imprisonment, which he has felt free (only there is he free) to complain about only since his daughter was born was his choice. And if he is going to send me this kind of nonsense about priorities not of the baby and family (that's understandable), nor job (that is too), but that he has to write something for the 2010 edition (that's NOT understandable) and I have to listen to this shit---then he can fucking send the whole manuscript back if he cares so little about it.

You people who cannot make your lives sparse, who are constantly adding more and more on so as to make things unmanageable, and as well, make the realization of your own work impossible (his paintings and drawings have suffered yet another delay and I said all right, then you don't want to do the book anyway, so suffer), always think it's so much more understandable that you have put yourselves in such predicaments.

Not that it's the same kind of case. At least you don't seem to have led anybody on. And he doesn't think he has either. But you OCD (busy-busy version) types are always the ones who get to call the shots and hold the high moral ground on time and schedule. Until someone gets tired of some of this fast-and-loose playing with his own time.

As a result, I had gone ahead and got a professional photographer arranged for some near future to photograph all of Jack's drawings that go into the book for emailing to Christian, plus ordered by eBay special old Spectra Polaroid film for 3 items to be featured that needed a cheesey Polaroid look in addition to the pro ones. Only to get Spectra film that is dead, not just unavailable in any brick-and-mortar shops anymore. Refund and replacement was refused, the film died inside Jack's old camera and cannot be pulled out after presenting 4 bleached pictures, I got stood up by someone on Saturday for the second time who had complained vociferously about how I hadn't called him--and what do I get as revenge on any of this?

I get to leave negative feedback on eBay, after having been sincerely begged not to after threatening it.

All of you prove that my unwanted book on the internet is true. My relationship with Christian is reduced to email (we never talk on the phone) in which he tells me of fitting in the goddam 2 fifteen-minuteses, and I'm supposed to give a fuck about such endless family values under guise of post-neoliberalism?

Beyond the negative feedback on eBay, what do I get?

I get banned from the Large Penis Support Group because I cannot see the difference in the two extreme words of hate speech--the so-called 'C-Word' can be used fully spelled out and the women on that low-class board are even called it as an epithet all the time, but the so-called 'N-Word' cannot even be typed within a quote or discussed as a hate word; one will note that even in such living hellholes as Lenin's Tomb, it is considered cowardly not to spell out the hate words when using them as subjects of discussion or within quotes. I also did not call anyone that word and black people used the word typed out in discussing hate speech. Since I was suspended for 7 days, I wrote the suspending moderator that I must be banned permanently or I would come back penitent and use every form of hate speech I could think of in his fucked-up establishment that I could think of--immediately.

Furthermore, I do not like people for the most part at all right now, and do not care about their problems, since I cannot even remember exactly what my own are. But you people with the busy-busy things definitely think you are the ones who are to be ministered to until you have time to get back to calling the shots.

[Jodi]

I like Dominic's comment best.

[patrick j. mullins]

I like Dominic's comment best.

What a peevish thing to say. In that case, would you please delete mine, as it was serious. But that ought to cancel out things as will suit you and your busy schedule just fine.

[George Darroch]

Sounds like Patrick needs to chill.

[patrick j. mullins]

"Sounds like Patrick needs to
chill."

Is that the same thing as 'needing to get a life'? Because George, just who the fuck are YOU? Well, you know what, I'll tell you. You're just another internet gadfly saying the same things the others say.

[bob allen]

At the risk of sounding all didactic and stuff, a great communist once told me "life cannot be simplified". This is not, or shouldn't be, about mere "acceptance" but about the recognition that one is doing the best one can do under the circumstances, and we all get overwhelmed at times.

[patrick j. mullins]

"a great communist once told me "

That's the ticket, thanks so much.

Because, 'if you don't support this measure, you are a Fascist.'

Yes, I am and determined to become more so, whether or not I support that measure. What would I have to do in order to support it, simplify my life, or just the 'acceptance' that Nanbo Pelosi is not going to do it. She is overwhelmed and doing the best she can under the circumstances.

[bob allen]

this is why politics is not always personal- you always get "some internet gadfly" like Patrick trying to make a pseudo intellectual souffle out of totally disparate ideas (yes , I get some of my best ideas from communists, and doing the best one can has little to do with Pelosi,but it was a nice, strange try) and pass it off as snark. Well , it is sort of cute at best...

[patrick j. mullins]

pseudo intellectual souffle

I hadn't heard that since George Wallace. The remainder weren't important, I had just thought Jodi would have understood the first one, because it was a kind of direct encounter that we should have been capable of executing at this point. It didn't work, so my understanding of the tacit agreement of internet shallowness is, if not complete, at least I can see that the large percentage of the 'communication' is fearful.

Her remark could therefore be seen as bearing out my assessment that she hadn't 'given it up', but rather that she'd got back to winning by choosing between two guys she values highly among people who consort with her within these parts. Instead, she felt insulted, which proved once again that the moral high ground is on the specific types of responsibility held, so that one kind confers privilege to vent frustration and the other (for I was doing precisely what she was doing but on the other side of the divide that is defined by different kinds of thinking and activity) does not have this privilege by asking permission, but rather by just going ahead and doing it anyway. One seems justified, the other not, until it is realized what the stakes are and how then delimitations are possible to be made on the other side of the sort with more official authority (despite the fact that in reputation she is more identified with the textbook leftism and its beneficent offerings), and I, having less of that particular kind of authority, can claim other forms of it of which she alone among those residing on this thread are aware. These things have to do with positionings that are not supposed to assert certain authority and yet are supposed to as well (because they always then insist that they do by doing it). It is too hard to go the further steps that one had outlined some time back (nothing specific alluded to here), so one puts the same formulae in a different format and starts over again.

As for the snark, it was not any of it that. It was to mark time after her first comment which was meant to put me in my place--and it did do this, but it also put her in her place; and by then that wasn't only the lofty one.

Bob Allen therefore turns out to be far less perspicacious than George Darroch, who was the only person I was actually rude to. He was, in fact, right, I did need to chill, but that's such a boring phrase, and also uselss, since if one needs to and can't--at least not right then--it doesn't have any meaning. Because who needs to chill? People who haven't the right to be angry or pissed off. People who have the right 'not to simplify, but rather to accept' their overly scheduled lives are not told to chill. They are told to get a wife, which is a cleverness that offers a sexism in which family-values-imbued comrades can mutually exult, because of old histories that delve in various feminisms are understood to both, so that their can be some nastiness involved. This is understandable, but the part I'm explaining is not going to be useful in the ways that are the things I can and have explained. The snark was hers, and she would like to stop doing that: It's familiar by now, so doesn't matter. The only things that changes are the effects it has.

So that the real secrets will not be revealed, and those are what were needed, and what she might have been positioned to find--and did try to, but with only mild success.

The great Communist was interesting, though, because the non-simplifying is nothing I've ever heard from Communists, but rather from Buddhists and Hindus and simple-life types who aren't involved with communism except in naturist communes. I never heard communists talk about how anybody was doing the best under the circumstances, but it was my refusal to espouse communism, most likely, that made Jodi's being overwhelmed at the same time I was overwhelmed of a different nature. Communists will identify themselves as such, Fascists usually will not, or it's cancelled out in the admission. I could still be a Fascist while admitting it only to a Communist and on a Communist blog. This is helpful to me, because it prevents me from putting myself in positions in which I would lose time by being subjected to Communist brainwashing--and it can take years to get back into the ruling class once this procedure is effected. Such things have ultimately been enriching in the past, but as one gets older, there is not that kind of time that one can play with, with all this precious theory that lightly covers realities that are for the most part left alone and to which is paid homage many aspects of status quo.

You can call it incomprehensible garbage, but it could be you just don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. If so, I was just working out some things and enlivening the dead space which always returns--and is comforting by now to most in its vaporous passing and disappearance. But not everybody goes the same route. So that hardly anybody who reads this here is going to 'like it', because it did not respect certain unwritten rules, which become boring after awhile. I certainly wouldn't be writing a long comment like this if I didn't believe in it, would I? It's not like I was trying to catch the ear of someone who might be able to 'help me', is it?

No. I know the whole way all of these interactivities work, and there had been just the smallest envelope of time in which a final effort could be made, but it was really to late for that, and there won't be any further openings.

[patrick j. mullins]

"The great Communist was interesting, though, because the non-simplifying is nothing I've ever heard from Communists, but rather from Buddhists and Hindus and simple-life types who aren't involved with communism except in naturist communes."

This needed to be corrected, because the Right Honourable Communist was saying that 'life could not be simplified.' One needed the 'great' before the 'communist' to even try to float something like this. The point was to sympathize with the inability to simplify by asserting that it was not something you could take meausures toward achieving, but rather just, well, we all get overwhelmed sometimes, and so we 'share' this with our comrades. Then we get back to our respective professions of repeating ourselves, since it's much to hard to concentrate. So that would allow for a constant accumulation of busy things, but not a subtraction of any of them, at least such subtraction would have no relieving effect. These kinds of things are all based on ideological alliances, because I was not being as unsympathetic to her sense of being overwhelmed as it seemed. I was saying that there is granted a privilege to be overwhelmed by the comrades to other communists. I, the Fascist, have to take this privilege--or I won't get it. I will be the scapegoat, the entertaining light-mischief (or perhaps more) type who adds the jarring note and cannot be assimilated, so is humoured until scapegoated and punished.

I like this role that has been assigned me well-enough except when I need a haircut, as now. But that is easily remedied, of course.

The point is to catch me at something. But I am needed as the Fascist until the show is over, and I can be dispensed with. That's why I keep getting gigs of all sorts of clandestine kinds--obviously it's in my interest to keep the show going, but there's not much I do on the blogs any more, because the scene is almost as dead as vaudeville at this point. There are some other things to do, though. People wish they could worry their pretty little heads about these things through the screen, but they can't. Then the hard businesses of the world take over, and all promises and alliances are broken or altered.

But convention is what rules, and even I respect convention well-enough to know that opportunism is simply impossible without respecting it. Maybe it has to do with how overt and obscene one can be and still think it's appropriate. Oh well, it had its good moments.

[patrick j. mullins]

Apologies to all I've offended--but is it really so horrible to go through a process together in which two people, for whatever reasons, are going through states of being overwhelmed, and find their way through? Jodi is a friend of mine. And I've taken a bit too much advantage here, so now she may give me advice privately if she wants to on how to set up a blog if Christian wants to to put pieces of the book up as it progresses, with the accompanying art, now that Christian has informed me of delays in publication that mean duress, but not failure to publish.
I said I wouldn't have a blog, but since the book will now definitely eventually make it into print, Bear Stearns has been bailed out.

I mean--what are people supposed to do: Be upset but also 'not have been upset'? Isn't that what friends are for?

[bob allen]

sorry to have "baited" you Patrick, you are too smart by half and I don't mean it in a bad way, peace

[pebird]

Patrick with all due respect ...

I've read all the comments - twice in fact.

I must confess that when I first saw the title of the post I was scared.

I thought that Jodi was giving up blogging. And I still don't know where she is on this, hence my anxiety.

It's ironic that in a post explaining about how much one has responsibilities to others and so little time, the comments get shifted to someone else's overloaded life.

[patrick j. mullins]

"It's ironic that in a post explaining about how much one has responsibilities to others and so little time, the comments get shifted to someone else's overloaded life."

Think it is ironic all you want, it actually kept it within the framework of overload and overwhelm--that I included my own overload does not minimize her overload. Has it not occurred to you that all else is simply Slippage into MoreMySpace? There is no dividing aporia in this case, which is always observed. I know her well enough now to take this chance with her, even if it doesn't work perfecly (what does?), and she's certainly done it with me before, and knows it, even though it was in different form because we are different people. Sometimes you have to take a chance on confronting an issue and seeing if it will become a more living thing and real developments will occur. OR--don't we then end up with more stories along the lines of how the Democrats refuse to really confront the Republicans and the evil of the Bushies (not that I'm comparing either Jodi or myself to these, but still if there is to be anything that is really living instead of just pussyfooted around in abstract terms which generally return to Square One in record time...).

And what if Jodi did decide to lighten her load by quitting blogging (I doubt you have to worry about that, but don't know). That's surely nothing she owes either you or me.

Christian got much the largest brunt of my annoyance, but even then it didn't go quite over the edge, and out of it emerged a new creation with the work: Between the FOUR BOOKS about Metropolitan New York Crawlspace will be written 3 Entr'act Poems of Deep Switzerland, one of which will be called 'The Two Fifteen Minuteses of Deep Lausanne'. This is the kind of thing that can grow out of people engaging in lively, slightly dangerous moments--although it's not for everybody. I am fairly sure Jodi is capable of assimilating it. What she doesn't have to do is read something for me that she herself mentioned, given that she may not have Two Fifteen Minutses Per Week of Deep Geneva.

So, sorry if I've offended you, too, PEBird, but there are just dimensions to life. You should frankly be glad that the normally flat internet can hold within itself something that does have some living fiber to it. If you're not, then you are welcome to go into High Dudgeon (very little approaches that giddy feeling, as we all know.)

[old]

Perhaps life would become simpler if you got the tenured job at an ivy, acc, pac or big-ten that you very much ought to be offered.

[pebird]

Patrick:

"that I included my own overload does not minimize her overload"

Of course, it doesn't minimize her overload, it maximizes her overload, by having yet another of one's space filled with someone else's problems that need addressing.

If you can't find the irony in this, then I do believe I am offended - as we all should - whenever someone willfully ignores the obvious.

[patrick j. mullins]

"then I do believe I am offended - as we all should -"

This doesn't surprise me at all, given your past temper tantrums toward me, viz., fury over some technical details at the film 'Babel' which you misconstrued. You took it so far that you wrote me emails explicitly declaiming that you had 'purposely meant to inflict hurt' on me. Now all I said in that case was to forget about it, that I didn't take it badly or seriously.

Of course, right in the spirit of what it seemed I was doing (I was perhaps doing that at first, seeing in Jodi's post an almost mirror image of what one of my two best friends had grotesquetly written me that same morning--and became fully aware of just how grotesque it was), you can continue along the blogger-hate route even after I have apologized twice--and perhaps add a further element of the 'group therapy' to it--except that is not what you are trying to do. You are not trying to see that 'There is life after group.'

Now, I am now addressing you quite individually, because you are not someone I intend to have any further dealings with. Your emails to me about Amelia and Babel I now see as only further manipulation and hypocrisy, positively REDOLENT with insincerity.

While it it true, that Jodi might not like me to take matters into my own hands, my own style, as it were, she has found value in what I have contributed here in our mutual interest in blogging, in that I freely offered a lot of my own ideas that are going into my own book which she was free to use in her own, very differently shaped book, but which had different concerns. She had been very interested in what I was saying about the virtual stores, the various kinds of things going out of business, and the unusual fellow sixfootsubwoofer wrote some interesting and lively comments at the time this was most intense in discussion. As well, she took notes recently when she and Paul and I met in New York when something would come up in discussion that would seem applicable to what we were both mutually interested in.

Therefore, at this point, I do have slightly more freedom that I would otherwise. She had even wanted to assure me that I'd be cited in the book for the things I'd offered, although that never occurred to me.

But as for you objecting to one post in which I work out something OF MY OWN--GOD FUCKING FORBID--just shows that you want me to accept the true homo sacer status--somewhat like the hairdresser who listens to all the dowager's complaints and soap operas as a shoulder to cry on and then the hairdresser is dismissed as being of no further value. I am sure this is not what Jodi would do to me, even if she has ignored everything of value I've said here (had the gall to talk about MY book, oh yes, I did, when that book was surely HOMO SACER compared to anyone else's blog post, not to mention book). But you would. You are different. Even too apologies are not enough for you. You are once again attempting to inflict cruelty, just as you told me in those emails a few years ago.

I'm afraid in frienships, things that are not perfectly pretty come up from time to time. That is perfectly normal, and anyone capable of friendship knows it. Now, the other commenters I was overtly rude to were not nearly so ungracious as you absolutely insist upon being, so I will merely say you have been offensive to me the last time you are going to be. If you have a hard time with it this time, you may nevertheless not write me any emails explaining anything. If you can convince Jodi I am not a friend of hers, then more power to you.

Obviously, I meant 'did not minimize equal importance of her overload', which you, in your determined meanness, have again misconstrued for the purposes of delaying any kind of calming down and reconciliation that might occur. You used 'minimize' as opposed to 'maximize', which you know full well was not how I meant it.

You are Jodi's friend, and perhaps I am no longer considered to be, but you definitely are not my friend, and I don't believe a thing you say in your pettiness. You think you are being chivalrous or something, but you are actually just trying to inflame and propagate bad feeling. I apologized not once but twice for some of the tone of what I wrote, although never for the whole drift of what I was getting at, which was legitimate. The second time I even apologized to you, and you refused to accept it, and wrote this little note about how you had indeed gone the road of High Dudgeon.

Now, if Jodi is so delicate and fragile that she cannot see the many dimensions of this thread, then I don't want to be her friend either, and you can perhaps claim a victory. As for you, spit out whatever else you have to say to me here, because you are NOT going to infest my email box again with your blatant pettiness and insincerity. You ought to at least understand that when she liked Dominic's witticism I was not really offended at all, he's a very nice fellow, and also naughty in his own way like me.

But you will have no second chance with me. Being a person of rage is one thing; a person who stays furious and holds grudges is quite another.

[Mehmet Çagatay]

patrick j. mullins:

"Think it is ironic all you want, it actually kept it within the framework of overload and overwhelm--that I included my own overload does not minimize her overload."

I recalled an anecdote told by Lacan at the beginning of Seminar 17. I hope it might help to temper the tension here:

“One day somebody who is perhaps here, and will no doubt nor make herself known, accosted me in the street just as I was getting into a taxi. She pulled over on her scooter and said to me, "Are you Dr. Lacan?"
"Yes, I am," I said to her. "Why?"
"Are you holding your seminar again?"
“Yes, of course, soon."
"Where?"
And then, no doubt I had my reasons for this, and I ask her to take my word for it. I answered, - You'll see,"
She then took off on her little scooter with so much throttle that I was left both nonplussed and full of remorse. It's my remorse that I want to convey to her today by apologizing to her, if she is here, in the hope that she will forgive me. In fact, this is surely an opportunity to point out that it's never, in any way whatever, by another person's excesses that one turns out, in appearance at least, to be overwhelmed. It is always because their excesses happen to coincide with your own. It was because I was already at this point, in a certain state that represented an excessive preoccupation, that I no doubt expressed myself as I did, in a way I very quickly found in inappropriate.”

[Jodi]

Mehmet--that is a beautiful, wonderful response. It works perfectly. Thank you so much.

I confess that I wonder if part of my appreciation for it is the way that it overlaps with where I am now, as opposed to last week. I have taken care, withdrawn, done work, come back, and realized that my response did represent an excessive preoccupation.

Thank you again.

And thanks to everyone who took the time and care to contribute and respond.

[patrick j. mullins]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/jobs/22shifting.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

This is in the paper today and I saw that she's got a book from 2002 called 'What's Happening to Home?...' This one is about workplace distractions, which sounds like it might have some useful images for me, unless I decide there might be a greater benefit from finally reading 'Jane Eyre' before watching the Joan Fontaine movie. Anyway, you might know her work, this is the first I've heard of her.