Epistemographer

It’s been five months since I defended my dissertation and started work at George Mason; four months since I last wrote anything substantial beyond book/research proposals or short, unsigned book reviews for Publisher’s Weekly. I’ve spent that time recovering from the whole dissertation process, mulling over what went right and what I can do better next time (the mere presence of the phrase “next time” there is telling), and justifying my relative unproductivity as a necessary recuperation after writing a dissertation. One month slipped into two, and now four months have flown by, much more quickly and effortlessly than I’d anticipated.

I’ve been busy, mind you, immersing myself in the world of humanities computing and pushing the “making technology” part of my brain harder than it’s been pushed…well, ever. My job’s fantastic, and I’ve been thriving in an environment where I’m expected to spend time reflexively analyzing information technology, then actually implementing those analyses in tangible ways. Put simply, I’m in a great place, with great people, and I still can’t believe how much I lucked out. But, I’ve lately been feeling like there’s something missing. There’s this sensation that I’ve been getting for the past month or so, a very tangible and almost physical pressure building somewhere between my eyebrows and the crown of my head. After a week of taking Tylenol to no avail, it occurred to me that this might not be a physical symptom, but a mental one.

I started paying attention to how I was spending my days, and I quickly realized that there’s something off-kilter in my life – in short, I spend my days soaking up information: from blogs, from books, from journals and newspapers, from colleagues, from conferences. This isn’t something to which I’m unaccustomed; after all, I spent the better part of two years in a research mode, learning about the video industry in preparation for writing my dissertation. But there’s a key difference – all the information I was taking in was directed, filtered for an eventual goal. I weighed every note, every line of an interview, every trade journal article with regard to its place in the final product.

These days, I’ve been taking in huge amounts of information, but I don’t have somewhere to direct it. To put it simply, my mind seems stuck on input, and I need to start outputting or I’m going to overload. I spent so long working on one huge writing project, I realized, that I’m somewhat adrift without it. Maybe the best indication that something’s up is the fact that I’m not writing on a daily basis – this blog’s more or less lain fallow, and I haven’t touched my journal since the summer.

At about this point, I get fed up with myself. “Waaaaah,” a nagging voice in my head mocks. “Life’s so hard. Suck it up and do something about it. You’re feeling like you’re all input and no output? Start writing.” This is the switch that luckily (or unluckily, depending on your point of view) is a core part of me, the safety valve that transmutes mopey navel-gazing into purposeful action. So, here’s where I am: my writing’s gone to shit and I’ve let myself slide into undisciplined patterns; I’ve basically been indulging in information gluttony. Needless to say, this is not a state of affairs that sits well with me, and it’s damn well time I did something about it.

So, here’s my New Year’s resolution: in addition to any miscellaneous things that might crop up, I’m going to write at least one substantial post every weekday, built around an idea and doing something vaguely interesting with it. I haven’t decided who my imagined reader will be yet (someone in my field? a layperson?), but I’ll figure it out at the pace of at least 250 words per day. And hopefully, I’ll shake off whatever malaise seems to have taken root under my forehead.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 31st, 2004 at 3:17 am and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.