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Kathleen Fitzpatrick
2025-05-31 08:08:47 -04:00
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<subtitle>The long-running and erratically updated blog of Kathleen Fitzpatrick.</subtitle>
<link href="https://kfitz.info/feed/feed.xml" rel="self" />
<link href="https://kfitz.info/" />
<updated>2025-05-11T12:39:42Z</updated>
<updated>2025-05-31T11:22:25Z</updated>
<id>https://kfitz.info/</id>
<author>
<name>Kathleen Fitzpatrick</name>
</author>
<entry>
<title>All This</title>
<link href="https://kfitz.info/all-this/" />
<updated>2025-05-31T11:22:25Z</updated>
<id>https://kfitz.info/all-this/</id>
<content type="html">&lt;p&gt;There&#39;s a moment in the 2001 Michael Bay classic, &lt;em&gt;Pearl Harbor&lt;/em&gt; (which &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/pearl-harbor-2001&quot;&gt;Roger Ebert once described&lt;/a&gt; as &amp;quot;a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours&amp;quot;), in which Kate Beckinsale, having been reunited with Ben Affleck, is attempting to explain how she could possibly have abandoned him for Josh Hartnett. Ben, of course, had been reported to be dead, and Josh was hunky and sweet and &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;, so, you know. But a teary Kate says, and I quote: “I didn’t even know until the day you turned up alive — and then &lt;em&gt;all this&lt;/em&gt; happened,” waving her hand vaguely over her shoulder at the still-smoking wreckage.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I have thought about this moment more times than I&#39;d really like to admit over the intervening 24 years, but never more so than in the last four months. &amp;quot;We were already facing budgetary challenges in the college — and then &lt;em&gt;all this&lt;/em&gt; happened&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;waves hand vaguely over shoulder at the still-smoking wreckage&lt;/em&gt;). &amp;quot;I was worried about the future of this project -- and then &lt;em&gt;all this&lt;/em&gt; happened.&amp;quot; (You get the point.)&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;all-this&lt;/em&gt;-ness of all this is utterly flippant, to be sure, but I&#39;m beginning to understand the utility of &lt;em&gt;all this&lt;/em&gt; as a container for the incomprehensible. We are facing circumstances that periodically cause me to lose my vocabulary. I don&#39;t know how to name it without breaking down, and I suspect that this is true of a lot of my colleagues. And so we talk about things like &amp;quot;the current moment&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;the federal funding landscape,&amp;quot; ways of signaling what we all know -- that we are living through a fucking horror of our country&#39;s own making, the destruction of everything that matters to us, the kidnapping and torture of members of our communities, the completion of the descent into what it no longer makes sense to call anything other than fascism -- without landing our conversation in a place in which it becomes impossible to go on.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I am trying to reckon with &lt;em&gt;all this&lt;/em&gt;, and with the desire to wave my hand vaguely over my shoulder without looking too closely at what it&#39;s gesturing toward. I have been doing a bit of writing around it, and am hoping that I&#39;ll be able to share some of that in the weeks and months ahead. I&#39;m not sure where it&#39;s all headed, but it&#39;s at least an attempt to be honest with myself about my reactions to what&#39;s happening, as well as an expression of hope that we might find our way through together.&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Networking</title>
<link href="https://kfitz.info/networking/" />
@@ -131,21 +142,6 @@
&lt;p&gt;And in exchange for accepting all that? You get to actually &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; here. You get to have some real purchase on life. You get to spend your finite time focused on a few things that matter to you, in themselves, right now, in this moment.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;— Oliver Burkeman, &lt;em&gt;Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Rest</title>
<link href="https://kfitz.info/rest/" />
<updated>2024-12-21T15:00:16Z</updated>
<id>https://kfitz.info/rest/</id>
<content type="html">&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m back to my all-too-slow reading of Oliver Burkeman&#39;s &lt;em&gt;Four Thousand Weeks&lt;/em&gt;, and am finding myself a bit haunted this morning by this passage:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Rest is permissible, but only for the purposes of recuperation for work, or perhaps for some other form of self-improvement. It becomes difficult to enjoy a moment of rest for itself alone, without regard for any potential future benefits, because rest that has no instrumental value feels wasteful.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Haunted, because I &lt;em&gt;at least in theory&lt;/em&gt; started a vacation yesterday -- or, rather, two days of vacation followed by my university&#39;s relatively new December 24 to January 1 closure. But I&#39;m having a super hard time actually turning work off. Partly because the needs of my colleagues have not stopped just because I&#39;ve taken a couple of days off. Partly because I cannot get myself to stop reflexively checking all of the various messaging systems through which they ask me for stuff.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;That&#39;s on me, not them. I&#39;m thinking a lot this morning about what it would take for me to genuinely shut everything down and walk away from it all, even for a couple of days. It&#39;s tough to imagine.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Anyhow, Burkeman goes on from this passage to talk about the &amp;quot;pathological productivity&amp;quot; inspired in no small part by the collision of Calvinism and capitalism, and the ways that one&#39;s &amp;quot;tendency toward virtuous striving and thriftiness&amp;quot; were -- ahem, &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; -- imagined to be a sign of one&#39;s state of salvation. Which rang all kinds of bells for me, and made me go in search of &lt;a href=&quot;https://kfitz.info/outward-and-visible-signs/&quot;&gt;this blog post from 2012&lt;/a&gt;, which reminded me how little I&#39;ve learned in the last twelve years, or rather how much I&#39;ve had to learn again and again and again.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Rest for its own sake. Rest for purposes that are non- -- or even anti- -- instrumentalist. All of this requires the ability to understand the value of the human in the world as about &lt;em&gt;being&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;doing&lt;/em&gt;. And this is hard, hard, hard.&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
</entry>
</feed>