Archive for Resolutions
‘Cause I can
“So many opportunities I’ve wasted
When what I wanted the most
Was to prove to the whole world
That I did not need to
Prove anything to anyone”
(Renato Russo, “Almost Unintentionally”) *
I’m capricious. I don’t shy away from hard-work, but I can only do it if I feel completely unconstrained. Doing things because I have to, because I have no other option, because that’s what’s expected of me…. that just doesn’t do it for me. I can’t do things out of fear, nor can I do them out of desire to impress people. Which means I’m really hard to motivate. Once motivated, though, I can keep going forever. The difficult thing is to get me started.
As an undergraduate, I remember really identifying with Dostoevsky’s “underground man” in “Notes from Underground”. I haven’t read that book since I was 19, and maybe that was just an existential phase every young person goes through — maybe if I decided to pick up this book today, I might find I’ve changed so much that I should be embarrassed to have publicly said those were feelings I identified with. But maybe not.
A more recent and even uncannier experience was taking the Jung-Briggs-Myers personality test a couple of years ago. The description I read of my personality type (INTJ) is the most accurate description of all my innermost secrets – and INTJ are famous for hiding their secrets really well. Every single line made me go: “This is me! OMG, this is me too! Whoa, so me!” Here are some examples:
“Whatever system an INTJ happens to be working on is for them the equivalent of a moral cause to an INFJ; both perfectionism and disregard for authority may come into play, as INTJs can be unsparing of both themselves and the others on the project. Anyone considered to be “slacking,” including superiors, will lose their respect — and will generally be made aware of this (…).
“INTJs can rise to management positions when they are willing to invest time in marketing their abilities as well as enhancing them, and (whether for the sake of ambition or the desire for privacy) many also find it useful to learn to simulate some degree of surface conformism in order to mask their inherent unconventionality.”
And I used to think I was so hard to pin down: turns out I’m a textbook case for a personality type.
I’m confident, but hardly assertive; shy, but hardly modest; vain, but hardly fashionable (the vanity comes precisely in making a point of scorning fashionableness whenever possible); I take great pride in my humility; I like others to notice how invisible I am; I am extremely attached to my detachment, completely dependent on my independence.
The reason I bring this up is that I’ve been trying all sorts of motivational tricks to get myself to finish this PhD. Disregard for authority means that I couldn’t care less for the status or prestige the degree brings. The thought of dropping all at this point fails to provoke magical motivational fear: all it manages to do is to activate my shoulder-shrugging existential cynicism to whisper a “so what” through a smug smirk. This isn’t fun, I don’t have to do it, I don’t need to do it, I don’t care what others think if I do or do not complete it, so why do it?
And after days and weeks and months and years thinking about this, I finally found the answer: I’m doing this ’cause I can. Notice, it’s not to “see whether” I can, or ”to prove that” I can: I know that already, and I don’t need to prove that to anyone (did I say I’m not modest? I’m not modest. Did I mention anything about disdain? ). I think the prestige attached to the PhD really works as I deterrent for me: I worry that people will think I’m trying to prove something; that I’m competitive, stuck up, whatever, whatever… And today I realized that in my desire to “prove to everybody that I have nothing to prove” I really have been wasting tons of opportunities.
The desire to quit comes from missing my family, missing stability, missing my friends, missing the work I was doing in Brazil and the people I was working with. None of these things require a PhD. The people I miss will not stop loving me if I quit the programme (if they did, then I might be motivated to do it just out of spite). The important thing I realized today, however, is that they will not stop loving me if I finish it either.
Besides, it so happens that I’m in a position to do this, and most of them are not: I’m at the right place at the right time with the right tools; I am in good health; I do not have anyone who depends on my care and I don’t need anyone to take care of me. If they had this opportunity, they wouldn’t waste it. Why should I?
* My translation of:
“Quantas chances desperdicei
quando o que eu mais queria
era provar para todo mundo
que eu não precisava
provar nada pra ninguém.”
(Renato Russo, Quase Sem Querer)
(In)Decisive moment
Back in April, I had a plan. I would be Toronto from late April to late August, and then go back to Brazil, hopefully for good. (The going-back-to-Brazil-hopefully-for-good part has actually been the plan for a bit longer than that, check for instance the April before last.) August is now practically here, and the question is: am I going home now? And if so, is it for good?
The answer is: I do not know. I know I should know, but I don’t. The thing was, in my ignorant arrogance (incidentally, it’s interesting how ignorance and arrogance often go together), I actually thought I could finish my thesis by the end of this summer. This was back in February. By June, I thought I’d be happy if I could have a full draft done by the end of August. And now it becomes quite obvious I might not have even that.
And it is not that I haven’t been working hard: I have been diligent, and even productive (the two don’t always go together, but they have been lately). It’s just that I keep underestimating how much work a PhD requires (or overestimating my capacity, which comes to the same thing at the end of the day — or the end of the summer as it turns out).
So I find I have three options:
1) To go home at the end of the summer, finish my thesis there and come back later to defend it;
2) To go home at the end of the summer, give up on completing the degree and never come back;
3) Not to go home until the degree gets finished, end of story.
I must say number 2 is the most tempting of the three. I’ve written before that I was never that attached to the thought of completing the PhD: I was doing it just for the fun of it. If it stopped being fun, why do it?
But then I thought: it’s sooo close! It is close, isn’t it? Is it actually close? Problem is, it’s been looking as if it’s close for a while. For quite a while. A very long while. And yet the end seems to keep eluding me. And as you might have noticed if you’ve read any of my recent writing (e.g. this entry), I’m homesick. Silly, I know. But I am.
The thought then comes: why not go home like I did last August, spend the year there like I did last year, and come back again next April like I did this April? I could try to finish the writing there, and come here when it’s done, when the weather is nice (I couldn’t handle another winter). I could take up same summer job again, which conveniently comes with room and board, which is quite handy given that I no longer have a place of my own in Toronto.
This sounded like an excellent idea. I got excited for ten minutes. And then the lists of cons quickly got ten times longer than the lists of pros.
1) The trip Brasilia-Toronto is becoming increasingly more difficult. I can’t even start tracking all the posts I complained about:
a) the logistics of travelling (e. g. all entries for October and November 2007). Add to it the fact that I heard rumours Brazilian airports were going on strike again this week. This does not seem to have actually materialized, but I have been there before when this happened, and it’s just not fun.
b) rising fuel costs means rising plane prices. I’ve always been able to get home for about Cdn $1,000, give or take $200, depending on time of year. This is less than rent in Toronto for two months — which makes a trip worth it if you’re planning on staying more than a couple of months. So far the prices seem to be stable. But you never know what it will be like a year from now.
c) rising emotional costs. Getting myself ready to leave Brazil for another trip to Toronto has become increasingly more difficult at an emotional level. Before I used to get all excited. Couldn’t wait. Counting days and all. But now I’m so excited about being there, all the projects that I have going on there, that I find it hard to leave my life there to come here. Last time it took me about a month to reconcile myself to the fact that here I was, once again. Now that I’ve settled in, I’m actually happy to be here. It’s just that the getting-ready-for and the settling-in nowadays take a lot more time and energy than they used to ten years ago.
2) You’d think that giving myself a year before coming back to Toronto would balance out most of the costs I’ve just mentioned. But then there are other costs:
a) time: my visa expires January 2009. It was a lot of hassle getting it renewed last November (see here and here). And this was so even though I had proof of funding that outlasts my passport expiration date. But my funding expires April 2009: that its, less than four months after my current passport and visa expire. Even if I could make a case for why my visa should be renewed for more than four months, there is another problem:
b) tuition costs: funding ends April 2009. Which means that a year from now this degree will be costing me 15,000 dollars a year. I know I have often complained about how little money I make. But owing a lot of money strikes me as being exponentially worse. Besides, here comes blessing in disguise again: I’m not eligible for loans in Canada because I’m on a visa; I’m not eligible for loans in Brazil because I haven’t lived there in ten years. So waiting until next summer is simply not an option.
So turns out I’ve only got two options, and not three. The decison really comes down to committing to staying here until this thing is finished, or just go home now and forget about it.
One could call this a very decisive moment in my life. Except that I feel completely indecisive…
Neoteny
Keeping resolutions is hard. And this finishative business, I tell you, is super hard.
For instance: I broke the resolution I made a few weeks ago to stop reading. This week I read a book. An entire book.
I may claim as attenuating circumstance the fact that it was a non-academic book. Very much so. Though there are somethings in there I can definitely use in school work. In the middle of more or less explicit references to different types of body fluids and more or less elaborate descriptions of their flow, there are real gems, like the following:
“Neoteny” is “remaining young,” and it may be ironic that it is so little known, because human evolution has been dominated by it. Humans have evolved to their relatively high state by retaining the immature characteristics of their ancestors. Humans are the most advanced of mammals – although a case could be made for the dolphins – because they seldom grow up. Behavioral traits such as curiosity about the world, flexibility of response, and playfulness are common to practically all young mammals but are usually rapidly lost with the onset of maturity in all but humans. Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
Tom Robbins, in Still Life with the Woodpecker, p. 19.
Finishative
I was talking to by brother yesterday about my usual “problems” (namely, interest in a million things, but in nothing in particular). My brother, in his typical wisdom, diagnosed my problem as “too much initiative, too little finishative”.
He found this neologism in one of those airline magazines. I thought it was a brilliant concept, one that reflects my ailment really well. After all, I deserve a degree of “Professional Beginner”, for all the language, music, dance courses in which I finished the first level and that was that.
The word my brother was using was “acabativa” (we speak Portuguese). I googled it and found 513 links. The one I liked most had as title something like “This must be the reason my blogs have stopped coming”.Which really shows I have a textbook case of finishative deficiency (it sounds so… musical).
Thinking about how I could turn this scenario around, I appealed to blogging once again. So I thought “how would one say “acabativa” in English?” (so I can write about it here). I found 42 results for a google search of “finishiative” and 64 for “finishative”. The sources: sites with advice for sales, business, management, chess strategy, Christian and Hindu sermons…
Moral of the story: I think that a bit more finishative goes well everywhere. Starting with this writing of mine — because even finishatives must start somewhere.
P.S. You might be wondering why I picked the spelling “finishative” over “finishiative”. Reply: while the extra “i” makes “finishiative” resemble “initiative” more, the “i” in “initiative” belongs to the “initi-” root, whereas the “finish-” root is i-less. Maybe you were not wondering about this, nor even interested. To which I say, “oh, well.”
Four months
Sartre said that 3pm is either too early or too late to do anything you want to do.
I think a similar thing is true of the period of four months: it is either too long a time, or not long enough.
For instance: I came to Canada to spend 4 months. Then I liked it so much that I stayed another 4. And then another 4. And so on, and so on. It has now been 8 years.
Last Christmas I decided it was enough. I would do another set of 4 months, and go home in April. And because it was supposed to be the “last” 4 months, I stopped investing energy in trying new things, because, after all, what’s the point, I’ll be gone in four months.
The funny thing though, is that when I first came, the same justification was used for exactly the opposite behaviour. I had to try everything, and fast, because I’d only be around for four months. I had no time to lose. So I just made friends and went places and did things and was generally happy and carefree.
But whereas in my first four months in Canada the short amount of time translated into an incredible openness, in this last four months the opposite was the case. All of a sudden four months was too short a time to start anything worthwhile. Granted, it was winter time. But still. There are thousand of things you can do in four wintry months, as my friend Danilo who just moved to Montreal last Christmas can attest (http://degelocanadense.blogspot.com).
It is now April, and the four months have again been extended for another four. Will it be too long or too short to do things I want to do?
This time I want to say: it is just the right amount of time.
Mid-April Resolutions
1. To stop reading, until I’ve finished my dissertation. I’ve read more than I can fit into it already.
2. To sit down to write a single sentence, instead of waiting for the whole page to materialise at once. Or the whole dissertation.
3. To think at least 5 impossible thoughts before breakfast.
4. To write at least one of these down. Preferably in fiction mode. But maybe also dissertation mode.
5. To stop complaining, unless it is in writing. Preferably in fiction mode. Or poetry.
6. To go to the gym before going to school. No excuses.
7. To stop overanalysing everything, unless it is in writing.
8. To practice talking once in a while, but not about the things I have, am or will commit to writing.
9. To be less economical with my camera. Lower the bar about what the photographic worth of things.
10. To be less economical period. Especially with smiles. There are more where these come from.
Simple is too complicated
This week I really really wanted to stop a bit and just enjoy time with my friends. Something simple, nothing fancy. Sit down, listen to music, have a bit of homy food, pão de queijo, brigadeiro. Something that is festive but in an ordinary way. Something spontaneous.
But spontaneous doesn’t work this way: you can’t plan it. And simple these days is just too complicated, in so many levels. It’s not simple to find time to sit down, to find the stuff to make pão de queijo, to explain a brigadeiro, to explain what counts as simple, and why.
I think that one of the hardest things of living abroad is to have to come to terms that your familiar and simple is now fancy and exotic. And what counts as plain and simple is neither plain, simple or straightforward to you at all. And spontaneous sometimes takes just too much effort.
This week’s resolution: to plan less.
(If the plan is not to have a plan, does it count as a plan? It should, it’s a lot of work.)
