Who Am I Anyway?

In graduate school, I've been pretty wrapped up in academics, so much so that I don't engage in a quarter of the things I'm passionate about. I've also lost some of my passions. I came to K-State a fairly conservative to moderate individual who was publicly a devout follower of the Catholic Church, privately struggling with it all. I'm not that person at all now, and I often think about why and ask myself if I need to re-engage those passions because they've fallen aside for the wrong reasons.

First things first. I was a vocal atheist, turned agnostic by reason and beauty, turned Catholic by beauty and loneliness--I wanted shared values that a Christian community offered, even if I wasn't sure I bought into it all. I met a charming fundamentalist Catholic fellow who I fell head over heels for. For his sake, I sought out all the reasons behind the doctrine of the faith so that I could reconcile myself with what I disagreed with. I rhetoricked myself into fundamentalism. When he decided to become a Capuchin friar, I didn't want to be a hypocrite, so I kept it all up. I blew all my savings on a pilgrimage to France hoping to rediscover my faith there, but it was shriveling and dying because it was built on a framework of compromise. I am an agnostic, and really, I always have been. The world out there is so beautiful and so structured, that I honestly believe a God is the most feasible explanation for the complexity of it all. Do I think he gives a crap if we're all Christian or Muslim or straight or any of it? No. I see this God through nature, and anything that seems natural to me has to be a part of his system. I often find what keeps religion and I from bonding is that its too exclusionary of what seems natural.

Two, I really am a rhetorician at heart. I see the world through a rhetorical framework, and I explore the world with that framework in mind. People annoy me when they use biased and hyperbolized rhetoric, even when I agree with them. Everything I love has to do with what I see as best rhetorical practice. It's odd, but it's how I engage with the world.

I'm a fantasy and speculative fiction writer. As a fundamentalist Christian, I decided I was going to use my novels as my mode to evangelize. Face-to-face conversation about those things seems just too pushy. People need time to mull things over. My masters project was supposed to be all about figuring out what the best rhetorical practice is for religious rhetoric in narrative. I've learned a ton about it, but the trouble is, the novels I've invested the most in are Catholic novels, and I'm not Catholic anymore. It's okay. What I've learned has made possible that at least one of my Catholic novels, the further along one, can be made into a book that promotes understanding. A book that is acceptable to the isolating Christian while still handing them the tools of understanding those who believe differently. The best rhetorical practice is to understand other people, and while I'm no longer a Catholic, I've met too many Christians that I love dearly to be able to stand that division. They're good people, and I hate when they're hyperbolized into women oppressor's, and money-grubbing-Republicans, etc. Those aren't the people I know. That's an exaggerated stereotype.

That doesn't even touch on my speculative fiction, but let's put that on hold.

I've never read an article on a piece of legislation that I ever felt was fair. When I had time, I liked to pour over both sides' articles to see how they each spun upcoming legislation to find the conflict and the inconsistency. Then I'd try to understand it. Sometimes there are flat out lies about what a piece of legislation says, but often the two sides offer differing interpretations of the potential consequences of a piece of legislation. The fears they pose are real, they're valid, but they're also hyperbolized. It's what we do when we argue. I like to write or talk about why each side thinks what it does, what the value is behind each sides' summary of legislation that is causing their interpretation of consequences, and I like to complicate the issue. Nothing is ever that simple, and I like to point out why. This approach to politics is tedious though. I have to have time to read both sides and to peruse the actual legal documentation (which after a course on stylistics where we looked at some legal documents is actually fun to me). Graduate school has certainly kept me from serious politics, and it was one of my principle activities before.  I realized the other day how much I operate on hearsay now and argue points as if I actually know enough to do so. I don't. For this more than anything else, I want out of graduate school.

A major side effect of all this is that I occassionally come across legislation that I think is as problematic as people say, and I like to speculate on what the world would be like if it passed...in the hyperbolized style of speculative fiction. Some of the historically failed legislation for women's rights would have demanded some interesting things of men and women legally that I believe would make great and horrifying alternate universes. I want to write those stories.

I like to read National Geographic because it's the most inspiring thing for the world-building necessary to write fantasy and speculative fiction. It's a place to engage in diverse culture and biology--to get tiny snapshots of the unknown world around me so that I can share with fiction readers a broader perspective--that's the rhetorician again.

Interestingly enough, I don't want to be a novelist. Having to write to pay the bills doesn't create good writing, and I don't believe I could produce anything worth writing as a novelist. I will write and hopefully publish a few, but I don't want to be cranking them out because I have to.

Instead, I'd rather do more technical work. I really like manual writing and copy editing. Manual writing is like a puzzle--take this complex task and break it down into simple steps that are easy to follow. I like the challenge; I don't get bored. Copy editing lets me engage with large quantities of text, break it down structurally and organize it with the tools of grammar and punctuation. I like language structure, and I like that I'm one of the few people I know with a detailed understanding of how it works. It's always nice to feel specialized.

I also like health and fitness reading, organic food, working out--things of that nature. I cook now, but do I engage in the challenge of cooking both healthy and gourmet food? No, I live by butter and cheap tricks. I want to have a regular fitness routine again. I think I might like to join an adult swim league or tennis group. My shoulder is messed up for swimming, and I'm not really that great at tennis, but why should that stop me?

I like to read fantasy and science fiction from a large variety of subsets. My favorite author is LE Modesitt, Jr. because his magic structures are based on real-world sciences (including music--and he did so better than Elizabeth Haydon), and he writes hard science fiction, so I can learn. I love him because he's a male author who wrote a likeable and powerful female heroine when so few can.

I like to crochet and want to learn more stitches. I want to learn how to sew again because I don't remember at all. I want to play an instrument, and since I don't feel inclined to learn a new instrument (like the cello--I always wanted to play the cello), I'd like to get a baritone or something so that I could play music again. I was a band geek. My teen years are consumed by that identity, and something important is lost in letting that go. I also used to sketch portraits and paint water-color maps for my novels. I haven't done art in forever. I'm not sure I can, but I'd like to try.

In an overly wordy nut shell, these are the things I cannot lose about myself. I am political, a rhetorician, a writer, a chef, a fitness-fiend, a crafter, an artist, a musician, and a nerd. Any job that compromises these things about me is a job not worth having.  Any person who cannot appreciate these things about me is not worth having.

A Little Rhetorical Pick-Me Up

Obviously, I've been feeling a bit low the last few days, so I made the following little visual to put in my cubicle. Famous rhetorician Kenneth Burke (who pretty much has a cult following in academia) liked to break the rules a bit. He wrote the following poem to define humans. It integrates seamlessly with his works of rhetorical theory.

As you can tell, this poem is the inspiration for my blog name, and the quote upon entry is from another great rhetorician, Jim W. Corder. These guys don't just write boring theory. They help us to understand the world in new ways. I find Burke's theory of "terministic screens" helps me to understand Garrett Lisi's TED talk on particle physics and quantum mechanics.



The idea of terministic screens is sort of real-world metaphor (in my mind at least) for the implications of particle physics for understanding everything described by Lisi. The terms we associate with a concept are connected to it in some sort of larger relational network. The interaction, shape, and network of all the diverse pieces and the way they move and connect helps us to interpret what we see and form new ideas about it. It's too complex to ever even really talk about effectively in application, but it's still really cool.