Statement of Purpose

* I write because I can't do anything else.

* I cannot write very well. I used to think I could.

* I write because there's nothing else left.

* I am dissertating poorly, but I've actually been putting in real time, real work on it. This doesn't make me feel better, but it fills up time.

* I am writing as if my life depended on it. But it does not.

* I have entered retirement from writing poems.

* I still think about poems and post them to the other blog and sometimes to this one.

* I am, despite my depressive tendencies, a huge optimist. Things have to get better, right? People are basically good, right?

* I am deeply insecure about my ability to think. Another blogger poet made fun of me in a comment box a few months back, and basically reminded me what a moron I am. I think he was right. I am not a rigorous thinker. I am a cloudy, clotted thinker. My problem is the sorting out. I would often prefer not to sort, but rather, to let myself wallow around in ideas, not settling.

* I have ethical concerns about precision and control, which sound to me too much like rigidity, and the sort of resolve that drives armies.

* Maybe Callicles was right. I know I said this before, but the good fight takes good management. Maybe this is why I'm sloppy. I'm deliberately sabotaging my ability to "get ahead," to "be better."

* Even my loved ones tell me that I am at times rude, abrasive, arrogant, stand-offish, isolated. I know this and it breaks my heart.

* Why the self-examination? Why not?

* I just graded a stack of forty essays on "the sonnet." Two were particularly good.
I feel like a fraud because I subtracted points for sloppiness.

* Am I teaching students the very things that I deplore? Or do I deplore these things because I'm lazy and ineffectual and it's easier for me to deal with myself if I believe that I'm some sort of ethical rebel? Probably the latter, which makes me doubly fraudulent.