Courage (Ulysses) - my brush with the heroic

I just took a look at a project that I've been working on for years. I mean that literally. It's been years. I've shared the work in a bunch of different professional forums, but the ultimate goal is to get it out there a paper in a peer reviewed journal. I tried once with an earlier version of the project, but it was very quickly killed by the editorial board of the journal I selected. I was aiming high so it didn't come as a total surprise. I revised the paper and made it much better this time. I've gotten additional input, reworked the worded over and over again, obsessed over the figures, and whittled the paper down to the main point that I want to deliver. It's just been sitting in my computer for a year or so. I haven't had the courage to push it back into the gauntlet of peer review. I thought there was just enough hard work left that I couldn't find the time to do it. 

There isn't that much work left. I just read it and it's essentially finished. I took out one awkward section that overstates the conclusions of some data. The rest of it is solid. That one section that I edited has been the difficult transition for me over the course of this entire project. The data are clear. The primary interpretation is clear, it's that transition from describing data to interpreting data that has been hard. I need to say enough without making claims that go what the data can support. I think I'm there. Now it's time for the really hard part. Now it's time for the part that requires courage. 

Submitting a paper for peer review is scary. You're exposing yourself to a possible failure. Facing the possibility of failure requires courage. Picking up a book as imposing as Ulysses takes courage. Hard books are hard to pick up but much easier to put down. They can be very rewarding reading experiences, but they can also be dry, boring, and just plain unpleasant to read. Ulysses is not dry and boring. It's actually much more engaging and entertaining than I anticipated. It's just not an easy book to pick up at the end of the day. The Name of the Wind was easy to pick up as I was rounding into the cool down phase of my day. It was a fun romp before heading to bed. The thought of Ulysses makes me spend more time watching TV or doing something on my phone. Reading a few virtual pages of The Redbreast is an easier bite for me to chew even though that book is vastly inferior to Joyce. It's all plot and things happening and suspense. I don't need to spend time in Bloom's head. I just get to ride along with a story for twenty minutes or so. 

Choosing to take on Joyce has made another failure very likely. I've read 19 books this year. My goal was 30. At my current pace, it will take me the rest of the year to finish Ulysses. I will finish The Redbreast in the not too distant future. If I finish both of those books, I'm at 21. Finishing a book that I checked out of the library, To Have or To Be, would get me to 22 (I would still only have reduced my to be read pile by 20). I was being ambitious with 30. I knew that I had lots of less than quick reads on my shelf. I will be ok with 22 for the year if Ulysses is one of those 22 books. I've had that book for a long time. I've been putting if off until some time in the future. Just like running a marathon, I realized that some day needs to be today at some point. Making it through a book that has scared me off year after year is a bigger accomplishment than just reading some arbitrary number of books. Even if it means that Book Shelf Zero will be that much further into the future. I need to get through these scary books eventually. I might as well check one off now.

Time takers, scary books (not the Halloween kind of scary), and the existentialist threat

Reading my books was going to be my big intellectual effort for the next couple of years. I switched this blog, which I used to use to post pictures of my shirtless torso, to a new subject to give me a space to ramble on about these books to make the process of reading them more than a check the box/draw a line through the title kind of exercise. The point wasn't to merely read the books, but to watch the books impact me and see how much all this reading changed me (if at all). Reading is a great way to spend time, but this blog was a challenge to see if I could make more of that experience. It hasn't really been that, and that makes me a little sad. I've read some very powerful books this year, but I haven't spent this extra time with them to more fully digest and incorporate what I've read into the way I view myself, my life, my family, the world.

There are two obvious things in my life that I can point to and blame for my failure to reflect. The release of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a good culprit. The time that I would normally use to write posts has been given to playing that immersive, addictive, and very amazing game. When I fail to meet my 30 book target at the end of the year, Zelda will get the blame for that too. Large chunks of reading time have been given over to exploring Hyrule. I'm not proud of it, but I don't really regret it either. I've had fun playing that game. The second easy scapegoat is marathon training. It's not that marathon training takes reading time, I'm just too tired to spend much time reading. It's hard to read when you're dozing off with the book in your hand. This has been a totally unanticipated aspect of the training program. I was ready for the long runs. I wasn't ready for the fatigue. The early mornings that go with the long runs don't help much either.

Of course it's not too late for me to start writing about the books I read. I'm only 17 deep. I still have 163 on my shelves. Maybe I can start spending one night a week reflecting on what I've read after I'm finished with the marathon training (and we aren't going to baseball games every Saturday night). I could always start right now. The sad truth is I do most of my writing while I'm at work. I just haven't had the time or the desire to do this kind of writing while at work. I have slowly slid into a bit of a coast over the last couple of months. My desire to think and write hasn't been the most intense. Maybe I've been tired, maybe I've been bored, maybe I just needed to take a breather from being too cerebral and just go with the flow. Maybe I've just been too busy seeing all the way things aren't going as I would like (I'm looking at you career) rather than finding ways to keep pushing and challenging myself in ways that won't get captured on a performance review.

I haven't really thought about it in these terms until just now, but I think I've been dealing with some regrets. I have plenty of relationship regrets. Those have weighed heavy on me as I work with my wife on a few issues. I have career regrets. I'm working on making peace with the fact that the way I want to live my life and job roles that would be the easiest route to career progression do not fit well together. There will always be an element of frustration in my job when it comes to the way we do things. There's nothing I can do about it so I just have to learn to live with it. The optimism and believe that things will eventually be different that define the early phase of my career has been burned away. Finding a purpose and meaning in my work has been a challenge this year. I feel lost.

The fact that I'm writing this post is a sign that I'm emerging from this wandering phase. I've been lost in distraction more than observing and being engaged with my world. Disney World podcasts are fun, but they are really just a way for me to slip out of my current state and weakly inhabit a different type of experience. The emergence of Whiteness into my awareness has given me something more substantial to think about. The clue hunting for the landscape has also been helpful. I used those things to get out of my head. Focusing my intellectual energy on something outside of my concerns has helped me get out of that repeating loop. (Whiteness has also been the biggest threat to my book acquisition restriction. I almost got a book that would help me understand the fuss. I found a pdf for free on the internet instead. The concept is a vague and ill-defined ideology based more of perception and interpretive experience rather than anything solid and objective.)

So here I am, poised to move beyond the shallow pool I've been swimming in for the last year or so. I'm ready for a scary challenge. My first instinct was to scour my wants and desires to find a challenge that I could start to focus on as my marathon training starts to ease up and I shift into the winter (and a much anticipated trip to the best of all distractions with the best of all companions), but then I thought about my desire to read all of my books and the vehicle that challenge provides to push me beyond normal, routine, and the everyday. It's time for me to do something scary. Is there a scary challenge in my reading list?

Yes. War and Peace. Ulysses. These are the scary books that I look at every year and always seem to avoid when it comes time to pick what to read next. I'm working my way through The Name of the Wind right now. It's a big fat book that had been a bit scary before, but it's an engaging and fast moving read. I think I was braced for another Malazan type of series. The cover made me think it was another dark and complex series with scores of characters, multiple plot lines, and an elaborate world. It's pretty much the opposite of those things. Limited characters, one story line, and a world that is not all that much different from our own. It's easy to sit down and read 20 to 30 pages of this one. I always know what's going on and have no trouble keeping track of events. That's very un-Malazan like. So maybe Ulysses and War and Peace will also be more fun to read than anticipated.

My wife asked me to tell her about somebody's life and death. Not a real person, just something made up. I came up with a guy who worked for a cereal company (it was while I was eating breakfast) his whole life, was just about to retire and enjoy his life, when brain cancer came along and ended everything for him. The ending is always looming above us. It's just a question of when. There is nothing standing between me and reading Ulysses than my reluctance to pick up the book and start reading. What am I waiting for?