Taxman! And etc.

I actually paid a tax-preparer for the first time ever today; I didn't get nearly the same sized refund as my buddy who recommended me to her (he got higher tax-refund credits cause he was an undergrad, not a grad student like me--the federal govt. wants you educated, but not too educated, it seems--same with pell grants), but I'm still glad I paid her, cause it turns out the grant-writing company I worked for didn't withhold any taxes on my W-2.

Turns out I wasn't on with them as a contract employee, but as self-employed. Saves them money this way, apparently. When I think of all the 12-hour days, nights, and weekends I worked for them, without benefits, and then their abrupt radio-silence after the grant deadlines passed, all to leave me hanging on taxes...well...it irritates me a little.

But, the tax-preparer lady worked her magic and saved me, something I wouldn't have figured out on my own, so, no harm, no foul, I suppose.

The conversation with the tax-lady then turned to grant-writing itself, she asking me if that was something I'd be pursuing. I said that after my experiences grant-writing for the U (and self-employed as well, apparently), I have definitively crossed grant-writing off my list of things I'd like to spend the rest of my life doing.

You can't just write grants for the sake of writing grants, you see--you write grants for something, you understand me? I have a relative working in grant writing down at UVU, and he always cites how rewarding it is to see his grants help build up the disability-programs there. In other words, he doesn't write grants just as a job, no, he writes grants with a purpose. He doesn't write grants just to write grants. Grant-writing is not and cannot be an end unto itself.

She mentioned that it is similar with business--if you get a business degree just to do "business," she said, you're actually restricted. Business is clerical work, you see--finances, administration, etc, all necessary, don't get me wrong, but no one starts a business to do finance and administration. And moreover, a business cannot succeed if it is only "business." No, the "business" side of business is a means to an end--you must have product, and product comes from engineers, scientists, creative teams with critical-thinking skills. Businesses are only successful in as much as they are driven by non-business elements. Business can only be a means, not an end.

But let's leave behind the tired example of business--business-types erroneously assume that their field has some unique monopoly on needing creativity, hard-work, sacrifice, etc, to succeed--you need all those same qualities to be a successful jewel thief, drug-dealer, serial killer, military dictator, politician, athlete, lawyer, humanitarian aid-worker, school teacher, missionary, doctor, scientist, musician, artist, or writer. Hard-work and dedication no more sanctifies business than it does fascism--my time installing security systems (and being a self-employed grant writer, apparently) taught me that for sure.

And to return to writing--the most dedicated writer in the world cannot write just to write--we do not just sit down and start typing out fully-formed sentences fast as a secretary about whatev. No, even with our great love of the written word, there still must be something that impells us to write. Saying "I'm going to write a novel" makes about as much sense as "I'm going to write a grant"--what is your grant for? What is your novel about?

My 6 word short story

With apologies to Ernest Hemingway:

"Talking pie. I ate it quickly."

Maslow

On a recommendation, I read Abraham Maslow's "Motivation and Personality." Roughly the first half of the book concerns his hierarchy of motivations, which I frankly found a little dull and ended up skipping; not that I think his hierarchy is necessarily invalid, merely that it is rather useless--I don't really know what to do with it.

I'm more of a fan of Victor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning," wherein the "Will to Meaning" (as opposed to Freud's "Will to pleasure" or Nietzsche's "Will to power") is man's deepest motivation--that even if one's deprived every physical need, as was him in Auschwitz, that one will still refuse to abandon a typhus patient even when an opportunity for escape arises, or an entire barrack will refuse to rat out a bread-thief to the SS, even if it means starvation for them all--because there is some deeper need, some more intrinsic motivation, that bypasses any artificial pyramid of physical or emotional needs. Again, it's not that Maslow's model isn't valid; just that I don't think it takes into account certain higher human behaviors.

But, the second half of "Motivation and Personality," concerning self-actualization, I did find much more intriguing; Maslow's thesis is that psychology expends far too much effort studying the sick, and not the healthy. (On a side note, a friend of mine studying psychology noted much the same thing--he said he once took stock of his classmates, and realized that each one was either a former drug addict, or was sexually abused, or etc; he himself was from a broken home! The lunatics appear to run the asylum in psychology; at least, they're who're most attracted to the field).

I'd always found the term "self-actualization" to be a rather pretentious, possibly-meaningless phrase, but Maslow's description of the self-actualized person as a psychologically healthy person did get me a little excited. I flatter myself that his is the model for the individual that I have unconsciously been striving to become all along, though I'll be the first to say I'm not there yet.

Briefly, according to Maslow, self-actualized individuals:

• Successfully resist enculturation
• Are problem-centric, not ego-centric
• Are unafraid of, nor disturbed by, and are even attracted to, the unknown
• Have a separate and personal, yet much stricter, moral code from the rest of society
• Can appear ruthless in how quickly they end relationships with people they perceive as dishonest, corrupt, etc
• Are good-natured and friendly with all, but maintain few true, close friendships
  
• Are at once more self-less (they genuinely care about the state of humanity) and more selfish (they know what they want and proceed to get it)
• Are both more sensual and more spiritual (they can find transcendence in the senses and bodily functions; the body does not disgust them)
• In sex, they are equally comfortable on top or bottom; they at once both enjoy sex more than others, yet do not crave it as desperately
  
• Do not tire of beautiful experiences (a sunrise or sunset will always be overwhelmingly beautiful to them)
• Resist false binaries
• Sincerely do not need or seek validation; but if they are honored or complimented, they still accept it graciously
• Sincerely do not let failures (or successes) define themselves or others
  
• Are very accommodating, but are not push-overs
• Are not perfect, but do not let their inevitable imperfections bother them
• Nor do they let others' imperfections drag them down, or affect their relationships
  
• Are good with children
• Enjoy mocking human foibles, but not specific individuals
• Can sometimes seem overly somber and serious at times
• Prefer to enter fields that help humanity as a whole
• Are capable of, and even enjoy, long solitude
• Are unusually quick, efficient judges of character; they know what sort of person they are dealing with almost immediately (Maslow heavily emphasizes this one)
• Are inherently unique without having to say so
  
• Would be embarrassed to be classified, or refer to themselves as ,"self-actualized"; they authentically detest bragging
  

Overall, according to Maslow, the self-actualized are simultaneously more fully human yet also more distinctly individual than the mass of humanity; no two self-actualized are the same (whereas so many psychologically shallow or sick people act are nigh indistinguishable). In many ways, they are the Nietzschean superman, save they prefer to help, not dominate, humanity.

You have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice

I had a professor in grad school who, if he didn't think I'd revised my paper right, would often scrawl in the margins, "What did Bob Dylan say about doing things twice?" And I always wanted to scrawl back, "I don't know, what DID he say about it, I wasn't born in the 60s you friggin hippie!"

Anyhoo, it turns out I DO know what Bob Dylan said about doing things twice! I was listening to Blonde on Blonde the other day, on the track "Stuck Inside a Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again," when suddenly I hear Dylan belt out, "You have to pay to get out of/
Going through all these things twice/Oh Mama, is this really the end/To be stuck inside a mobile with the Memphis blues again..."

Good song. And is apparently what my prof was referring to. It was an oddly apt allusion!

The Feminine

This past week I've had some success teaching my freshmen excerpts from Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own."

The most insightful encounter with this text came from one of my SLCC classes, where one girl confessed to feeling like every time she wrote something "feminine," that it was "just" something "frilly" that no one would care about. (Her first paper was on ballerinas, for instance). I stopped her right there and asked someone with a smartphone to google the definition of "frilly"--sure enough, "frilly" is defined as "decorative." And decorative, by definition, is something extra, something insubstantial. So, I drew on the board the following chart of this girl's comment:

feminine=frilly=decorative=unnecessary

Without fully realizing it, this girl had internalized that to be feminine was to somehow be unnecessary, insubstantial, irrelevant. And of course they're not; for crying out loud, without women, without the feminine, we literally cannot reproduce the human race. Women are not the frills, they are the base. Yet they've still internalized this marginalization.

Now, to seasoned feminists and critics, this is of course nothing new; but it still bears repetition, because of how easy it is to not recognize your own internalizations. I, with all my critical training, still fall into this trap. For example, a girl in another classroom, one who doesn't comment much, ventured to tell me how she was nervous about her last paper, since it was about shopping. That struck me, because I do remember grading her paper, and I remember silently groaning at the topic; because I'm a guy, and derive zero pleasure from shopping, considering it a frilly, frivilous activity.

Now, is that because I consider shopping to be a wanton indulgence of crass commercialism, gross materialism, and conspicuous consumption symptomatic of America's wasteful and unsustainable consumerist culture (as I like to think)...or, is it because I subconsciously consider shopping to be feminine...and therefore...frivilous? I wonder.