Fatigue
I have a blog. It’s called “We Are Here” with the url being based around “Too Right We Are” so you might think that there is more than one person involved. There isn’t. It’s just me. You can tell because I changed the tag line a while ago so it says “My Views”. But, truthfully, my blog was meant to be political.
I know a lot of people like to talk about how the personal is political. I don’t want to disagree with that. For instance, it’s important to be able to say, “Hey, this is me, this is my life” and it’s just wrong to think that one person’s ability to do this is equal to another’s for any given pair of individuals. But that’s not really the kind of politics my blog was/is meant to be about.
There are lots of different blogs out there. Straight up political ones take some topical idea and pass comment on it. A lot of these sites are policy blogs or pseudo-news organisations. Some of them are part of wider society’s intelligentsia or even just the intellectual wing of a given party. I think the latter is more where I wanted to be back when the tag line was “General Views”.
“We Are Here” sounds a bit like a “personal is political” rallying cry, in hindsight. There’s a New Yorker Cartoon that captures the idea I’m thinking about. “Here-ness” is an important concept in identity politics. It means being normal. Not normal in the sense of “usual” but normal in the sense of “mundane”… things that one doesn’t bat an eye at.

To an extent, this was the meaning of “here” I was after but I was planting the flag for an intellectual cult. That sounds bad, but it’s the best way to convey my meaning. “We Are Here” was about housing a way of thinking. And because I’m a forumite at heart and true forumites think blogs are for narcissists it has to be a cult. That’s not to say that I don’t care about introspection or uncertainty, but it is to say that “We Are Here” is forthright.
The trouble is that I couldn’t help but let the personal touch creep in. My blog posts aren’t just manifestations of a political way of thinking that has actively tried to unencumber itself from dubiously relevant foreign discursive elements (e.g. people of colour, black and white). All of the posts have some kind of personal voice… presumably a dull one (I have, apparently, just the one reader)… and I’ve tagged about a third of them with a “me” label outright. But it’s still not about me… and I don’t want to make it like that.
(Well, okay, I don’t want to make it more like that. There are plenty of posts which are probably more about me than anything else. Sure, I often frame them as advice, but still. The important thing is that now I know about Medium I can put it all here... which is ironic, because it is a platform more geared towards reaching other people.)
Which really brings us here. I started talking about my blog in a story labelled “Fatigue” for two reasons. Firstly, it’s a sneaky (?) way of promoting my blog. Secondly, because I find it very tiring trying to keep thinking up topics. And it is even more tiring trying to write topical posts.
You see, when you read things like 10 Strategies to Go Viral on Any Platform one of the pieces of advice they give out is “be timely”. It’s number 6 on that list, which is, truthfully, the only such one I can recall having read… but it’s obvious. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. Indeed, ever since I began to secretly harbour an ambition to appear in one of Bryce Edwards’ Political Roundups (example). I’m not sure when that was, but it feels like years ago, so probably was. This is hard.
New Zealand is a pretty small country and Edwards often pulls stuff from Twitter (I Tweet infrequently… the handle refers to my Student Course Reviews Pseudonym, i.e. Oz) so it’s not an overly ambitious goal. The trouble is that one has to work to (a) know what is timely and (b) write up “worthwhile” stuff. That is, material consistent with the other stuff I do. Which is often very, very long. Or some kind of commentary on my university experience. And lucking out? Well, it’s hard coming up with prompts too. I want to try a prompt website one of these days (Medium has already referred me to some).
The truth is, I don’t want to put in that effort. I have a theory, “If you’re really that good, it’s not like hard work.” I don’t think I’m that good… so often it’s a slog. Sure, I think I have top notch political thoughts, but I don’t think I write them up as well as they could be. I certainly often abstain from the responsibility of putting in all the requisite research. That really is hard work, and it really is necessary. But to a certain extent, once it’s done, it’s done. You just need to update every so often to stay aware of any paradigm shifts.
This is just one of the fatigues I am talking about. I want to write a blog post, but don’t want to write a blog post. I don’t want to have to think up a topic. I don’t want to put finger to key. If I had the idea and I was in a devil may care mood vis a vis research, maybe… I type quite quickly on a roll… but I’m just pointlessly tired with this. But, these other fatigues.
At the moment, I’m in the middle of the holidays… the so-called inter-semester break. If all goes well, this will not be my last lot even though I am in my last year. At this stage, I am thinking of pursuing Honours next year. But not in history. Don’t get me wrong, I like History. It’s a great subject. Do study it. Go to university and write essays about it. But don’t hope for assessment with flair… you don’t get those kinds of questions. No more, “I never wore trousers”.¹ And these kinds of essays are tiring. I am over them. Ironically, Honours history gives one more freedoms, but my fatigue is generic. Three more essay type things (barring surprises) and I’m done.
For the holidays, I’ve been pretty tired. This is because I tend to go to sleep early. By early, I mean, 4am. But I’ve been hitting the sack later than that. 5am, 6am, 7:30am and getting up weirdly. It throws me off. But the cause was Cities: Skylines. Luckily, I’m at a point in the game where my traffic situation is now intractable, and when the going gets tough, the tough hide under tables. The other cause is that I’m way too task oriented… and if I can’t think of a task… well, I just stay up for no reason.
There’s a really, really good television series that ends a character’s arc with a quote. I think you’ll find it appropriate here, “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a”.
¹ I used to be more free in exams too. But if you read closely, you’re not meant to communicate with the marker in assessment either. So now I’m a bit too scared. Although if I had the right kind of question, maybe. (I’m talking exclusively about short answer, not essay, exams here.)