I did manage to push right up against the boundaries of my physical endurance this weekend. I'm aching all over - from lack of sleep, probably, and I suspect the plane ride makes all my joints-that-ache-in-the-cold ache more. So my finger joints, toes, and left knee feel sore. Years from now that will be where the arthritis hits. I'm taking it easy today. Unpacking... I'll get the oil changed in my truck... Maybe I'll water the garden in the sun (though because my feet and hands are so sore I don't want to get them wet.)
I'm left, post-WisCon, with lots of inspiration and the resolve to write lots of cool stuff.
On the side of regrets: I wish I'd pushed to keep my translation reading in the programming, because I'd like it out there, and I know people would like it and think it's rad. I felt a deeper realization of just how much cool stuff I've been doing that is not out in the world and no one knows about it - because I don't do anything with it. I'm not sure what I'm waiting for. Little things are published here and there, but why not more? Because I haven't really tried. So, like, 1% of what I do is visible. That's just... I will endeavor to correct that.
The other result of WisCon is that I feel firmed up in my thinking that getting a PhD is not the thing for me. I'm already doing good work; I need to finish it and send it out. The wonderful feeling of WisCon is not having to explain yourself and your entire worldview in baby-talk. And what I think academia would require of me is so much of that, that I'd be frustrated. I admire, for example, Professor Steed's book on Utopias, but it's so simplified, well, simple is not the word, but it's like the foundations have to be so carefully constructed to fit the specifications of the Code, that the wonderful buildilng never quite gets built. And I want to build wonderful buildings, so byzantine and complex - not the foundations. I'm not suited. And the "discipline" academia is offering (through Prof. Steed and Prof. F. ) would train me to pour concrete foundations onto the bedrock. When I'd rather be perching elaborate gargoyles on my flying buttresses made of mist. They want to convince me I need both, but I'm unconvinced. I want to go way further than the academic papers I heard and (just as in translator-world) when I look at the people I admire most, they are intellectual-critic-novelists on the fringes of academia or completely outside of it (yet not unfamiliar with it). (T.D., G.J., U.L, J.R.) That's where I want to be. (And frankly - without being arrogant I hope - that is where I belong, with the wide strange range of my inner library, of what I've read and have to draw upon.)
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