Radio Free Akron: Never-Produced Short Films

I'm really beginning to wonder about myself. No, it's not that normal Andy-thinks-he-sucks, or Andy-should-off-himself sort of wonder. I wonder if I've reached the final plateau in the upward trajectory of my abilities in academia.

Really, it's a somewhat frightening propostion. I mean, if this is as high as I can go, finishing my dissertation, getting a PhD and teaching classes, then that's farther than some people get.

But I want to do more. I want to write substantive books and other writings that are important. Well, what is important? I don't know. I want my writings to mean something to the advancement of knowledge in the world. I want to contribute something of profundity. I want to think deeper and bring more than I do now.

I want this time to be the launching board, and the rest of my work to be the meat.

I've been here before. When I was a sophomore in college, I wrote a short film (never produced, of course) about a guy who was sooooo close to that next level that he could see it, he could feel it, and he wanted it. But his brain and mentality limited him, and he never achieved it, and he always wondered about that next level. Of course, that film's character was a loose metaphor for me. Who else would it have been?

My mental abilities, I thought, had plateaued at that point. I could see people doing more, and I wanted to do more... but I had handicapped myself with other distractions. I made it through, and it took a couple years (of an additional mental handicap whose name we won't mention right now) before I threw off the chains and moved upward.

Now, in the last five years, my intellectual abilities have grown substantially, but I'm back at a plateau. I know I can do more, I see others doing more... and now I want to be there. But my mind is blocking me, and once again, it's because of ways I have handicapped it. Last time, it was handicapped by substances and a really bad and unhealthy romantic relationship. This time, I've handicapped myself by piling on too much work.

Maybe a part of these concernscomes from the strange obsession in our culture with levels of status, and how education is just one psuedo-material expression of this status. I know I'm to the end of the road (or close) in terms of my formal education. Sure, there will be more levels to conquer (promotions, tenure, professor statuses), but the formal education is about over. Even these "next levels" I'm talking about outside of formal education are nothing more than figments of my imagination, metaphors designed to place my mindset within a context understandable to our world of status.

I guess I worry that, once I'm not guided by classes and by forced research, whether or not I'll be able to keep learning, to keep expanding my mind, and improving my abilities. I know I've only got a year-plus remaining in which that is my main concern, and I'm worried that I've wasted a good chunk of it by taking on too much work.

I see others reading deeper philosophy, and I want to be there. I worry that I'm a poseur and that this is as good as I'll get. I know my time is limited and that, at least until this semester is totally under control, I'm wasting time to get there. Sure, it'd be great if I could get started on Foucault's Archaelogy of Knowledge because it will be most useful to my dissertation... but because I fry my brain on teaching too many classes and too many stupid other assignments, by the time I get to Foucault (which is dense stuff) my brain can't start to process it.

I'm just hopeful that this plateau is only temporary. I remember my character's frustrations in that film when he never, ever, ever got to the next level.

It was a characterization of me, as I felt back then.

I don't want it to be me in the future.

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