My response to hearing people use the phrase “in real life” is generally akin to hearing nails screeching on a chalk board. For those of you who don’t have ears, this feeling is bad. I’ve been meaning for quite some time to write about this sort of bucolic, folksy ideal of “common sense” that’s quite often not at all sensible; I find that “in real life” generally conveys a subset of the same sort of blithely self-assured ignorance. Maybe it’s what I perceive to be the ironic condescension of it – “Oh, I’m sure you’ve having fun studying literature/history/philosophy, but what are you going to do with that in real life?” repeated ad nauseum, as if their primary occupation as Rite-Aid checker and professional arm-chair basketball coach had somehow made them uniquely qualified to comment on my future life prospects. This strikes me as particularly amusing because these people tend to be the sort who would be the last to contextualize their personalities within their own jobs; I hardly expect to find any glistening personal insights in the careers of cubicle monkies, UPS deliverymen, or real estate sales people, nor do I expect them to have a particularly ready quip when asked “So what are you going to do with all of those episodes of Sex and the City in real life?” Perhaps I can take small comfort in the fact that I can read the newspaper without a dictionary handy and understsand mot of the references in Pixar movies.
With all that said, I’ve never had a romantic relationship in “real life.” Now, I know what you jackals are thinking, and I’m sure at some point it will come back to haunt me when this is quoted out of context. I don’t mean that I have a BangBus subscription, nor that troll Eharmony. Quite the opposite – my personal relationships tend to consume large amounts of my “real life” time, and as such, tend to be short lived and mostly revolve around relatively obligation free points of my life – summers, winter breaks, college in general. As to whether I’ve fallen into a trap of assuming correlation = causation, I’m skeptical – perhaps not entirely convinced that the two are related, but the evidence seems to suggest so.
Figuring out why this occurs is slightly more complicated – and carries the added (obvious) risk of reaching those sort of comforting self-analyses that really just reify the things we pretend not to like about ourselves, the things you mention in an interview when someone asks you what your greatest faults are. “Probably that I’m too hard on myself,” you say, with the downward glance of faux-contrition, “I tend to let projects consume me.” But this is precisely the problem I think that I have with relationships – I have a difficult time finding the medium heat setting; things tend to end up boiling over or curdling on the back burner. This is, of course, not the actual problem; my stalwart readers would certainly remind me that this is merely a symptom, not a cause, and that I simply can’t leave them to draw their own conclusions. No, no, that would never do. The author-function persists, and we must be spoon-fed.
So. Why? Why are my relationships so much Fox News (loud, fast, frightening) and so little French cinema (long, slow, boring)? I suppose the obvious answer is that they’re a reflection of my own personality – lots of flash, little substance – although I think that hardly does me justice. The answer, instead, is perhaps the opposite: I tend to consume substance, or at least sift through it, at an all-too-rapid pace, and end up, like some sort of existentialist Bugs Bunny, frantically digging holes through my romantic partners, looking for some sort of metaphysical treasure before I emerge on the other side (Notebook screenings, divorce court, Valentine’s Day – wherever it is that relationships go to die.) This rarely works, because most people tend to have content which I either don’t find particularly valuable or rapidly exhaust, and I find myself reliving the same conversations and awaiting the ensuing breakdown, in which the wheels generally fall off completely and I embarrass myself in front of everyone who works at Applebee’s (again).
Of course, this would be so much easier if I knew what, precisely, I was looking for. I’ve commented on this behavior in a similar manner a few times in the past, mostly pointing out that my intellectual endeavors tend to be streaky and tenuous. Whether or not this is because I abhor the idea that one can’t simply be talented at all things, that it sometimes takes practice to become good at something is uncertain, although I suspect that my own arrogance plays no small role – “Well, if I can’t figure this out, it’s stupid and not worth my time.” Perhaps (and this is undoubtedly an over-eager application of post-modernism) the difficulty remains in my consistent framing of my personal life within a grand-narrative, in the belief that there really is some sort of unifying thread tying these things together, that I really do (or at least should) have a telos, a center or common goal that lies at the heart of all these thosuands of hours I’m wasting on Iranian revolutions and anti-Tibet movements and intelligent design debates on the internet. Maybe the important part is the questioning part itself – removing the emphasis from the particular content and placing it instead on the search. Of course, this is nothing more than a relocation of the telos onto the method, a move not entirely unlike creating a system out of deconstructionism, but it happens to be one for which society is willing to pay you and let you write books and drink all the coffee your little heart can handle, as a university professor. So yes, that’s what I’m going to do with that in real life; I’m going to ask questions that you never think about and it’s going to be financed by your tax dollars.
