Even so, the perennial problem of beginning is one of our more pedigreed dilemmas, plaguing a long line of make-believe figures from Hamlet to Prufrock and beyond in both directions.  In about a week America will embrace the annual Ritual of Bold Beginnings, although the culture takes  failure for granted.  That’s not an especially biting criticism, because change is difficult, and beginning the work that leads to change tends to be overwhelming.  Plenty will abandon the attempt because the transition is challenging, the progress is slow, the consequences not quite as shiny as they seemed in prospect.  Were I more pessimistic, I would say that those causes encapsulate life in convenient nutshell form, but as we all know, I am something of a pollyanna.

What concerns me today, as I sit here sipping my orange-mango juice that tastes more or less like grapefruit juice, is perhaps not beginning per se but the preconditions that set the stage for it.  That line of thinking brings me face to face with the matters of feeling I mulled over last time around, since business is always brisk in that old rag and bone shop where the impulse to change originates.  I don’t think it’s a question of will, exactly, or of resolve, or of fortitude or anything quite so self-conscious and self-reflexive.  The ultimate precondition, I think, is the instantaneous, intuitive cognizance of consequence, a calculation of losses and gains that occurs at the level of unutterable expectation.

I’ve been looking around at the shoes my homefolks stand in quite a bit of late.  Some seek new career trajectories, others new relationships, still others new ways of seeing, knowing, or being.  The moment such conceptions enter our heads, however, they begin to infiltrate all of our existing frames of reference.  Take for example my friend Ilsa (whose name has been changed because it amuses me to do so), who has logged seven years in a job she likes but does not love and who is thinking about turning her train down a fresh set of tracks.  Doing so involves earning graduate certification, yet even that modest step might yield (to her thinking) a rhizomatic explosion:  a new job, of course, but also new friends, new monetary concerns, a new commute, a new professional learning curve, perhaps a move to a new home, a new relationship to her husband, new time commitments, and plenty of welcome and unwelcome variations on all those themes.  She can feel in her gut with a visceral certainty she trusts that her current job does not satisfy in some essential ways and never will.  She does not feel with the same certitude, however, when it comes to imagining all those eventualities that might stem from setting a plan for departure into motion.  She has likened the prospect to pushing off from the shore with nothing but hope and oars, and that’s as apt  an image of beginning as you’re likely to come across.

I enjoy certain advantages when it comes to beginning anew, if only because I lack  intuition and possess what might best be called a scattershot imagination.  More importantly, the beginnings that most interest me tend to be interpersonal, which tends to utterly shudder any chance of anticipatory calculation.  Whatever interactive aspirations one might formulate cannot possibly anticipate the exercise of an equal and opposite will, one with its own wishes and ambitions.  When I boil it down to basics, all that remains is something like risk assessment, one of the more pointless forms of calculus.  Beginning itself is stripped of risk in cases like mine because one can never truly know what one has begun until the act of beginning is done.

So what does one do when one exhausts one’s supply of aspirations, when the cathexes that most engage the feelings and the faculties turn the self toward uncharted oceans or lands it cannot map?

I reckon one does more or less what Yeats did, though one is welcome to figure more freely the contents of the shop.

I’m a duffer, as you might guess, so rather than compiling Excel spreadsheets and clogging my computer’s circuitry with programs designed to crunch numbers, I instead have a variety of Word documents in which I record those patterns that promise to bear peculiar fruit after several years of steady observation.  When I go mad (I’ve tentatively scheduled May 2010 for my meltdown–save the date!) and they haul me away, I’m going to make some lucky cryptonumerologist very happy.

Anyhoo, here are some festive observations from my first three years at CMU (aided and abetted by today’s release of Student Opinion Scores, Central’s standard evaluation mechanism).  First, the basics:

• My teaching may be improving, as my “overall effectiveness” scores follow a simple, straightforward progression:  3.20 to 3.40 to 3.61.
• Literature continues to be my principal strength, with a three-year average effectiveness score of 3.55.  This is an especially interesting figure to me, since I have taught only one seminar (out of nineteen total classes) in my primary area of scholarly specialization.
• Intermediate composition continues to be the noirest of my bêtes noires, with a cumulative score that hovers around 3.10.  I’d like to think I’ve improved quite a bit (during my first year I taught four sections, which is decidedly atypical for a member of the tenure-track faculty, and earned two sub-3.0 scores that will evermore ballast the average), but my Achilles heel continues to be early commitment to a semester-long pedagogical arc.  I’m afraid that CMU’s master syllabus for ENG 201 and I don’t get on especially well.

And, thanks to my three-year tracking, some more interesting (if sketchier) findings:

• Statistical outliers (typically in the form of “very poor” assessments when the majority of a class deems my teaching “very good” or “good”) directly correlate to the forced enrollment of unknown students.  Our course caps are apparently spot-on.
• Courses in which I administer exams (and for which, I should note, I have corresponding review sessions and review sheets) score a full quarter-point better than classes driven primarily by essays.
• The same pattern holds true for lecture/discussion classes, in which I score a full quarter-point better than workshop classes with a high degree of discursive input by students.  I apparently talk real purdy.

At some point this summer, as I compile my tenure/promotion portfolio, I’m going to have to make a case for the ways in which my teaching (and service, and scholarship) exceeds departmental standards, which will involve some imaginative work with my own numbers and those included in the normative distribution reports provided by CMU’s Office of Institutional Research.

Let’s hope that I have the verse manuscript finished by then, lest I begin my fall reenactment of The Number 23 prematurely.

I play fantasy football, a game of very sober make-believe in which adults contend by picking real football players and battering one another with their statistics.  The better the performance–more yardage, more catches, more touchdowns–the better the statistics, which makes for the kind of manifest mathematics that the linguistically inclined can enjoy.

Early in the make-believe season I was faced with a complex make-believe decision:  I could trade Fast Willie Parker (a wounded Steeler) for Marques Colston (a wounded Saint), or I could trade Steve Slaton (a healthy Texan) for Andre Johnson (another healthy Texan).   These are the sorts of make-believe quandaries the avid fantasy footballer faces.  Enchanted by the prospect of having Slaton on my team for two more seasons, I held on to him and made the trade for Colston.  Andre Johnson, the fellow I passed over, subsequently went on a tear, notching five of the finest games wide receivers would record all season.

Colston, who had injured his thumb, rounded back into form slowly, but I have to admit that I picked him for the least calculated of reasons:  I wanted to see him do well.  I used that rationale for much of my season, picking players based on nostalgia (like Santana Moss, who’d been on my team during his crazy breakout season in 2005), or nice feature articles (like Matt Forte, who’s a nose-to-the grindstone personality), or really optimistic team photos (like Dallas Clark, the sole smiling face among the Cro-Magnon tight ends).  I even picked up Tom Brady, a quarterback on injured reserve, for good luck.  To make an already-long story somewhat shorter, the players I picked (Colston and Clark especially) showed up just when I needed them most, and I won the championship in our merry little league. 

What’s more to the purpose, however, is that I did not torment myself with regret for the poor choices I made in prior weeks.  When Johnson had a fantastic game, I had a good laugh.  In previous seasons I would track my decisions almost obsessively:  in the swap I describe above, for example, I would not only track Colston’s performance but Johnson’s and Parker’s as well, gnashing my teeth and beating my breast every time one of them had a stellar day.  Colston’s play had the only material impact on my team, but I dwelled overmuch on alternatives, those sins of omission and comission that theoretically (and ironically more often than not) cost me imaginary victories.  As you might expect, what was true in the Land of Make-Believe was also true in my wiggedy world as well. 

With the advantage of retrospect, I know that such thinking is misguided if not altogether erroneous (in a very Blakeian way).  Back in the day, however, it dominated my thought process, and it’s a terribly hard habit to shake.  I think playing the cards we’ve got rather than the cards we wish we had been dealt is one of the necessary thresholds we’ve all got to cross.

I’ve been reading the blogs of friends and colleagues this morning, and something like a pattern has emerged:  a surrender to What Is, which also involves relinquishing an infinite list of What Might Have Beens.  One friend has looked back at relationships forsaken and determined that she’s much better off as a singleton; another has surrendered to the impulse to write differently, even though it involves turning away from the writing she feels she ought to be doing; yet another has taken stock of his educational and professional choices and found contentment in those he made without too many pangs for those he didn’t.  It takes some time, distance, and lucidity to achieve such realizations, and it can take even more energy to sustain them when faced with a world crosscut with the lines of parallel lives. 

Recently I’ve been trying to shrug off some of the weight I’ve carried, burdens of convention,  projection, and expectation.  Could things have played out differently?  Sure and begorrah.  When it’s approached in the right spirit, it can actually be quite entertaining to envision the lives we might have led had we only taken different forks in the road.  What’s tougher, however, is looking back at doors we’ve closed based on sound advice and kindly counsel.  Making a smart call for all the right reasons is no guarantor of future satisfaction.

Were this a festival of real amor fati, I would look you straight in the monitor and tell you that I wouldn’t change a thing.  That would, however, be one of my filthier lies.  What I can say, however, is that I’m not going to apologize for my approach to criticism (which some kindly folks have frowned upon), my return to verse (which some kindly folks have actively discouraged), or my turn to speculative fiction (which even more kindly folks have dissuaded me from attempting).  I’ve done many awful things and made many rotten choices, but those will never number among them.

So in the spirit of the holiday season, best wishes to you and the things you do, whatever they may be.  Things might have gone differently, and they might have even gone better, but give your things a little credit for going as they should.

The local terrain’s been a bit shaky of late, and I’ve struggled to keep my footing.  There is genuine trouble afoot, to be sure, but I think the underlying issues that are upsetting my existential applecart are largely conceptual.  I’m not dealing with mind-forg’d manacles, nor has my life devolved into one of those epochs during which the abyss stares into me (the abyss can be rude, but I have checked it out discreetly in the gym, when it was doing lunges).  As usual, my inability to define the nature of the nuisance has grown into a nuisance in its own right.

When faced with cognitive crises, I normally dismantle and rebuild.  It’s tricksy, finicky business, if only because I am prone to constant self-analysis in the first place.  I can speak of such things metaphorically and analytically here in blog form, but the actual process involves staring at the ceiling, sifting and shifting information until matters make sense once again.  Somewhere behind the cases filled with frustrations, annoyances, and uncertainties there should be a box replete with nothing but needful things.  The trick is finding it in essentially limitless space.  Contentment is always the last place I look.

So today I find myself asking that odd, enormous question:  am I happy?  It’s a question I seldom ask, perhaps because all the responses I might offer will resist analysis.  Moreover, while the happy is a relative category, it’s not a comparative one:  I might recognize variations in contentment, but measuring those variations with a borrowed yardstick will do me no good.  There are other forms of happy in the world, but the only one that matters in this instance is my own.  (Envy is a cognitive option I ought not entertain overlong.)  Quantifying that happiness from one day to the next is like catching minutes in a sieve.

Rather than firing at the question with cognitive cannons, I find myself chipping away with auxiliary verbs.  More interestingly–and this probably tells you more about me than anything else I might say today–I’m none too concerned if the answer comes up negative.  Mine is a refined kind of misery, one that comes with satisfactions of its own.  If I discover that I am indeed unhappy, then I’ve got a precept to work with, build on, respond to.  I can use it to recreate my little universe, blink by blink.

What’s really surprising is that I don’t have a permanent crick in my neck from all the navel-gazing I do.  Of course, if I were not prone to navel-gazery there would be no blog, so count your blessings and/or curses as you see fit.

The best possible news, however, is that even now, as I’m breaking myself into bitsy blocks of bald man, steady traffic is still rolling through generativity junction.  Lines and ideas are finding their way through the rubble, and that tells me the source of happy is somewhere out there, no matter that I can’t see it from where I’m standing.