A Lament on Happiness

I know this may seem like an unusual title for a post, so I'll spare any particularly lengthy explanation and go directly into what's been on my mind.

I was asked today by someone very dear and close to me if I was happy. The question caught me somewhat off-guard, so I needed a moment to think about it. In the end, I told her that I wasn't satisfied with everything in my life right now, but that generally speaking, yes, I am happy.

But that response has only made me think more about why I had to think about it in the first place, why I couldn't just spontaneously answer "yes," and what particular faculties didn't instantly trigger a positive response. After all, someone who is genuinely happy would have no problem answering affirmatively in an almost knee-jerk manner -- it should be spontaneous, shouldn't it?

I've been left to conclude that one who's forced to think about if they're really happy can't possibly be as happy as they claim. So now I can't help but wonder what it is that's got me down.

I know for sure one problem is my lack of focus and motivation. A two-pronged problem, I know, but one that's been troubling me ever since I got back for the semester. After my hellish and absurdly long fall semester, I was excited for a number of reasons at the prospect of a fresh February start: a four-class workload instead of five, for the first time since Fall 2004; two English classes (one in Shakespeare, for God's sake!) and two teacher prep classes, as opposed to four out of five ENGs in the Fall; a 15-week semester that would actually last 15 weeks (well, 16 if you count Spring Break), as opposed to the 20-week-long Fall; and, perhaps most psychologically meaningful, the impending snap of my notorious annual bout of cabin fever, most pointedly punctuated by the arrival of spring and all its glorious buntings: Daylight Savings Time, baseball, and amusement parks.

The coming of Spring promised such great things, notwithstanding that I was genuinely excited on an intellectual level about all of my classes, something I couldn't say of the Fall. Somewhere along the line, however, -- perhaps at the realization that, once the stress of my JP, other papers, and exams finally dissipated, I was left with exactly 9 days of relaxing vacation and only one other soul local enough that I could share my time with him -- my enthusiasm towards the Spring semester began to wane.

Sadly, this trend has continued without adjustment. In a frighteningly linear pattern, my motivation has been slipping slowly into oblivion since the very first week of class. At the start, I attributed it to my lamentably pathetic work ethic of trying to play catch-up before beginning new material: since the first week of class was also Sign-Ins Week, I got no work done, and tried to complete the previous week's worth of reading before starting the next week's, a strategy that left me quickly backlogged. But even now that I've, for the most part, caught up with my work, I'm still unmotivated. This entry, for instance, is a physical manifestation of my chronic procrastinatory habits: I should be writing my educational psychology observation write-up, but I simply can't bring myself to do it. Instead, I'll awaken at 8:30am tomorrow morning and get it done, perhaps in too slapdash a fashion, and not particularly care unless my grade on it falls below an A-. And even still, there's no guarantee that I'll be motivated enough to improve my habits on my next write-up (see my reaction to my Shakespeare paper -- to paraphrase, "meh").

It also doesn't help that I feel constantly overwhelmed by the threat of impending due dates for projects of which I don't feel I have any particular sense of focus or direction. Case in point: my Spring JP. I know I'm writing on Nabokov's Pale Fire, and I know that I'd like to address the tropes of death and rebirth, and specifically the interesting relationship that Kinbote and Shade have with regards to these two issues. The problem is, I just can't motivate myself to sit down, do the necessary reading, flesh out the argument, and, quite frankly, suck it up and just fucking write it down. And it frustrates the hell out of me because, unlike last semester where I had essentially no choice but to work on a Keats poem (although, up until it damn near gave me a nervous breakdown in the first two weeks of January, I really did love working on it and am goddamn proud of the finished product), I chose the text completely of my own volition this time around! Of all the texts in the canon of American literature, I chose Pale Fire specifically -- so why the hell can I not sit myself down to do the work?

Now would also be a good time to bring my teacher prep work into the mix. Despite the swift kick in the ass I received at the beginning of the semester, during which I was acquainted with the ridiculous amount of in-class and out-of-class time I would be spending working on TPP 301, my portfolio has gone nowhere. And it doesn't help that every time I e-mail my PTP advisor, he's always AWOL and never responds. Recognizing that I've been slipping further and further into panic mode, I asked a few of my TPP 301 colleagues today how their portfolios are going, and all responded that they are in a nearly identical state of incompleteness as my own. This allayed my fear somewhat -- the fear that, needing to complete the portfolio by the time I leave for home in May so that everything is in order for me to student teach in the fall, I will fall short of the deadline and be utterly fucked come September -- but it still didn't make me feel any better about my situation, nor did it make said situation feel any less apocalyptic.

Having beaten the dead horse of "no focus or motivation" into submission, there still remains one other area in which I feel grossly discontent. It's a problem I've mentioned off-handedly a couple of times to certain privileged people, but, in the spirit of catharsis, I feel I must put it out there for all the world -- or however tiny a portion of it that gives a rat's ass about me -- to see.

The very first night I came to Princeton, instead of going out, I sat up late typing a story up at my computer. I thought it was marginal, though it had certain scenes of brilliance -- my description of the picture in the frame, for instance, continues, in my mind, to define what I consider in my writing to be "evocative." It was meant to be part of a larger text, but since I had no direction or idea where it was headed, I eventually scrapped it as a well-intentioned but useless fragment. I've tried on several subsequent occasions to write shorter, less ambitious pieces, but they too have failed to reach completion. Not coincidentally, I noticed that my musical output was tapering off as well: the lyrics were most certainly harder to come by, but even the touch for writing the music too was fading. Each chord progression sounded mundane, each new riff blasé. More frequently than normal, potential riffs were merely cast aside and never expanded into full songs.

In short, ever since I've been here, my creative output has declined to practically nothing. And this terrifies me.

Sure, there have been some exceptions to the rule, but they've almost exclusively been in service of a class grade. Two songs I wrote for MUS 104 in Fall 2003 managed to satisfy my likings (one, though simple, benefited from both heartfelt lyrics and a chorus that has probably the most amazing melody I've ever written; the other, though lyrically inferior, succeeds by virtue of a sophisticated and intense instrumental arrangement), my original satire for ENG 231 was one of the funniest pieces I ever wrote (no matter what my goddamn preceptor thought of it), and my emulation of Kipling in ENG 335 was so spot-on that, as both an assignment and a stand-alone story, it was practically perfect (and on this point, this time my preceptor agreed). However, these four pieces have constituted the whole of my successful creative output in the past three years, and I'm definitely not used to such quantitatively inferior results.

What's even more frustrating is that, right now, I have two amazingly great novel ideas in my head. One is a sort of murder mystery turned upside down, with lots of clever plot twists and character revelations. But what's really on my mind is an idea I came up with not too long ago, a grand sweeping drama about the very complex relationships between fathers and sons within three generations of a family hiding an unspeakable secret. I know it sounds kitschy to describe it that way, but if you gave me ten minutes and didn't mind having the plot spoiled, I promise you'd agree that if I were to pull it off, it would be nothing short of a personal triumph. I'd love to just be able to drop all my responsibilities right now and work on it, but I can't.

Worse yet, every time I feel like sitting down and typing up a scene, I feel overwhelmingly guilty because there are so many other pressing academic assignments that I should be working on but am not. At the same time, ever since my grandfather died, I've wanted to get it down as a tribute to him, because thinking about him and his life in Poland (where much of the novel would be set) is what set my mind in motion and eventually ended up in the fully derived plot I hold within the confines of my imagination. I feel now, more than ever, that I owe it to him to write the work he helped inspire -- but, as has been the case for months, now is not the right time.

The saddest truth that comes from all these revelations is that I'm not entirely convinced that, when the semester is over and I've got a whole summer of freedom ahead of me before a senior year that should be, on the whole, much less stressful than my junior year, I'll regain any of the focus, the motivation, or the creativity that I've lost. Or that, if I do regain those things, I'll be more completely and confidently happy again. Many of the emotional swings I've had over the past six months I've been able to successfully chalk up to the pressures of my work load, but it terrifies me to think that maybe that's not it. That perhaps, like Victor Frankenstein, whom I quoted in my last post, I'm doomed to see my ambition and potential whittle away to nothing. It's such a goddamned depressing thought.

So maybe I'm not as happy as I think I am right now. Maybe I will be in the near future. Fuck, I hope I am in the near future. For the time being, I suppose I can content myself with pushing myself through this rut into which I've fallen. My only hope is that I don't end up the way the poem Pale Fire ironically begins:

"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane..."

An Abrupt but Necessary Change in Direction

It occurs to me at this late hour that I've been abhorrently negligent in my updatings of this blog. I suppose the only excuse I have is that, with all the work on my plate -- and yes, I know I'm not doing it, but simply the idea that I should be doing it is enough -- I simply don't have the time to be spending on an update. Fortunately, today was a productive day, so I'm giving myself a free pass here.

As of late, I've determined a number of things. Firstly, to the dismay of my many loyal readers (and my sincerest apologies go out to both of you), I've decided to abort the mission of completing my Initiations saga, for a number of reasons. Besides having essentially documented the most fun part, -- the water fight, the part whose narration inspired me to put the evening's events into words -- I've realized that the rest of the evening, while an absolute blast, just doesn't translate as readily to the written page as I'd hoped. Part Three sucked, actually. And it was a pain in the ass to write because rotations took up so much of the evening's time. I guess I overestimated how much I would be motivated to continue with the endeavor after getting past the best part. Besides, I've got some other ideas that I'd rather be working with creatively, ideas that hold much more promise than this particular narrative.

And so, I bid my aborted progeny a fond farewell. May the story live on in my memory so that I can regale someone with it someday and leave them with a smile. That having been said, now that the burden of completing that narrative is off my chest, I feel that I'll be more productive and frequent with my updating. Bear with me as I try to get back into the groove.

I don't have much else to say except that I've spent much of the day reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a novel that almost everyone I know has read many times already but to which I have only recent been given exposure. It was part of the syllabus of my Gothic course, and I must admit that I didn't have high hopes, mostly because everyone knows "the Frankenstein story." Last semester, I read Bram Stoker's Dracula, and found that knowing "the Dracula story" in advance took certain things away from the experience, and made it somewhat less exciting and terrifying.

Much to my surprise, however, I discovered today that Frankenstein is a truly remarkable novel. As I read, I became increasingly more aware of the fact that "the Frankenstein story" as we know it is essentially an exaggeration of the sexier aspects of the story: unholy creation, a scientist playing God, a creature wreaking havoc on human life, murder, and mayhem. It's the stuff of horror fans' dreams. But the novel itself contains very few scenes that modern readers would consider truly horrifying. By contrast to expectations, the story is surprisingly affecting and emotional, with certain passages having such grand scope and beauty that it's easy to forget you're reading a novel meant to terrify.

There's also no distinct good or bad guy, no way that the reader can merely root for Victor or the monster: each has his own strengths and weaknesses, each cares deeply for certain people or convictions, and each has a certain uncheckable rage that exhibits itself from time to time. The motivations are what really give the novel gravitas, but it's those same motivations that are so missing in modern renditions of the story and thusly are so surprising to encounter in the source text. In fact, it's best to go into the novel thinking as little of what you think you know about Frankenstein as possible; otherwise, certain elements (such as the monster's superhuman speed and strength, and his quick education in and mastery of both the English language and the principles of argument) come as an almost unwelcome shock.

It does, however, take some patience. I found it hard to read in long passages, and in fact had to read it in three sittings (one of the novel's three volumes per sitting, a total of about 50 pages each of a Norton Critical Edition). Despite being incredibly good, it just doesn't lend itself to the kind of marathon reading that, say, Nabokov or Vonnegut does. The payoff, though, is well worth the price.

That having been said, I'll leave this post with one somewhat lengthy passage, abridged for the sake of generality, that appears near the novel's end and, I feel, strikes particularly poignant tones with me, particularly at my current age and condition. It addresses a scenario that I constantly fear will manifest itself in my own life; and the realization of such a tragic consequence has, in my opinion, never been rendered with such clarity until I read this today:

"'When younger,' said he, 'I felt as if I were destined for some great enterprise. My feelings are profound; but I possessed a coolness of judgment that fitted me for illustrious achievements. This sentiment of the worth of my nature supported me, when others would have been oppressed; for I deemed it criminal to throw away in useless grief those talents that might be useful to my fellow creatures. ... But this feeling, which supported me in the commencement of my career, now serves only to plunge me lower in the dust. All my speculations and hopes are as nothing; and, like the archangel who aspired to omnipotence, I am chained in an eternal hell. ... Even now I cannot recollect, without passion, my reveries while the work was incomplete. I trod heaven in my thoughts, now exulting in my powers, now burning with the idea of their effects. From my infancy I was imbued with high hopes and a lofty ambition; but how am I sunk!'"