(no subject)

[drydem]

After a discussion with bneuensc I realized that I am having trouble escaping the mindset from Sunday. Sunday at the kingdom game, I played an individual of complete perspective, who took into account all possible variables in an attempt to understand everything that was going on around him. He had an uncanny ability to observe patterns in the world around him and used that ability to allow him to act intelligently, efficiently and effectively.
Today, I am having problems divorcing this perspective from my own life. In thinking about my academic life, I am increasingly convinced that I know nothing. I have been thinking about my paper on LiveJournal icons, which I like to think is good in some respects, but utterly fails to take into account the work of Roman Jakobson, which, now that I've been reminded of Jakobson, is entirely necessary to displaying the ways in which icons are deployed. It just makes me feel dumb, like I've failed to take into account information that I've been told before, if only in passing. I feel like I don't understand ideas that I want to incorporate more fully into my own work, like Lacan's Real/Symbolic/Imaginary divides, or de Saussure's concepts of language, or Foucault's notions of power. I feel dumb.
And, to some degree, I realize that I am holding myself to an unfair standard of perfection, that certainly nobody expects me to understand absolutely everything and express it with pure clarity. But sometimes I wish they did. Looking at my Master's thesis now, I want to burn it and start over. I want to take all I've learned in the past two years and completely rewrite the damn thing, taking into account a better understanding of formalism and the ethnography of speaking. I feel ashamed that I thought it was good work, I feel like I have shown the faculty how dumb I am by even suggesting that it was good enough for a M.A.
I am a perfectionist in some ways. I feel that in every situation there is a perfection for which we should strive. If you aren't trying to do it completely perfectly, then why are you trying at all? But in the end, I need to accept the fact that I am not omniscient and move on.

Comments

[bneuensc.livejournal.com]

Now imagine taking something you wrote five years ago and having it be published and put on bookstore shelves where some poor bastard might pay money for the thing instead of just giving you a degree, and you'll have my periodic panic attacks over Doppelganger.

[drydem.livejournal.com]

the thing is, I feel less self-conscious about my creative work, because I feel that to some degree, I cannot control how well I write as much as I can control how much I've read.

[bneuensc.livejournal.com]

True, but on the other hand, the creative work is highly personal in a way that academic stuff isn't. So instead of it being "gah, I didn't read enough, and now everybody will know," it's "gah, I'm an idiot, and now everybody will know." Which is why Doppelganger has me more nervous/self-critical than, say, my honors thesis does.