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That was the month that was

After three consecutive months of 20,000 unique-visitors-per (oh, all right, I know some of you came back more than once), this humble little blog hit 44,000 visitors in May.  I’m amazed-- and appalled.  What to do next? It’s blog anxiety!  What am I doing with blog anxiety?! 

Well, first I guess I should thank everyone for stopping by, linking, passing along my Bush quiz and Lieberman rant, and other such things.  And yes, I know the Bush quiz needs more entries-- there are some great suggestions in the comments, and I should probably add one more of my own:

”I like the graft and corruption! I pump my fist in the air and sing that Lee Greenwood song every time Halliburton gouges taxpayers and negotiates lucrative kickbacks or drives empty trucks around Baghdad to boost their fees and jeopardize truck drivers’ lives!” (Thanks to Eric Smith for the links.)

Second, I should meditate on anxiety for a moment. 

One day some years ago I was sweeping up around the house when I had a flashback to one of my college-era part-time jobs, cleaning the Terrace Restaurant in Morningside Heights (the Terrace is famous for its views of upper Manhattan; the job was a $4/hr gig, 7-11 am, which gave me plenty of time to make my class schedule from noon onwards).  Suddenly I remembered, almost viscerally, how much of my life at 19 was defined by anxiety, especially my (entirely justified) anxiety about finding part-time and summer jobs while I was in school.  I was so anxious about work, in fact, that I spent my first week or so on that job terrified that I’d forget to cover some part of the restaurant before the cooks started arriving at 11, and that I would be fired before the end of the day.  So I cleaned like a madman, which struck me (many years later, sweeping up around the house) as strange, since it isn’t as if restaurant-cleaning is ordinarily a high-pressure job. 

When I started to play drums with college bands, I would get all wound up before gigs, worrying (a) that I’d drop a stick or (b) that there would be other drummers in the house who knew that I was self-taught and still learning.  I remember that before my band Normal Men opened for the Ramones in 1982, I sprayed my hands with aerosol deodorant gunk to make them dry and sticky, thinking that the only thing I could do to screw up the band in front of a thousand people would be to drop a stick.  (Funny thing is, I still have a tape of one of Normal Men’s gigs at CBGB during which I did drop a stick-- and you can’t hear it on the tape.  It wasn’t that big a deal.) I even developed a Hierarchy of Musical Mistakes by which to understand my (and my band’s) performance:

E-level screwups:  so egregious that even the guys playing video poker in the bar on the third floor know that the band flubbed one.

D-level:  embarrassing and bad (wrong notes, timing errors), but can only be heard by people who are actually paying attention.

C-level:  can only be heard by people who play your instrument and know what you really meant to do.

B-level:  imperceptible mistakes in which you don’t play exactly what you want but manage to play something entirely passable instead.

A-level:  mistakes that are better than what you intended to play, and which you eventually incorporate into the song.

Interestingly, when I went to graduate school and, toward the end of my first year at Virginia, started playing with Michael Dean and Todd Wilson in a band called Baby Opaque, I never felt a moment’s anxiety about performing; I was so consumed with graduate-school anxiety that I didn’t have any anxiety left over for music.  I would show up for gigs, set up, sound check, play, pack up, and go home, all as if I were fixing sinks or something.  Then when Nick was born, when I was 24, I was so consumed with new-parent-anxiety that I didn’t have any anxiety left over for my dissertation, and . . . you get the idea.  By the same logic, surely one of the reasons that I didn’t have too many assistant-professor tenure-track anxieties in the early 1990s was that I was far more worried about how to take care of a newborn with Down syndrome.

Blog anxiety . . . what a silly thing.  Maybe I’ll go play some music instead.

Posted by on 06/01 at 06:50 AM

  1. Sounds to me like you drink too much coffee. Anxiety really does decrease for me when I consume less caffeine, and all sorts of good things happen when I wind down to NO caffeine. What a crutch that drug is.

    Posted by Willie Mink  on  06/01  at  12:07 PM

  2. We did the baby anxiety thing while we were in grad school—my wife was pregnant with our first during her prelim exams, and with the second during her final defense.

    I think once you’re at a certain level of tension, you can keep ratcheting up the pressure higher and higher, and it just doesn’t matter. You’re maxed out. All the additional stuff becomes trivia that you don’t have the time to worry about.

    Posted by PZ Myers  on  06/01  at  12:37 PM

  3. Mr. Mink-- You’re right, I do drink too much coffee.  It’s Dylar I need. . . .

    Posted by  on  06/01  at  01:33 PM

  4. Ah, wish I could comply, but those German nuns were really really convincing. Anyway Michael, haven’t you figured it out yet? Caffeine IS Dylar.

    Posted by Willie Mink  on  06/01  at  04:51 PM

  5. 44,000 hits a month for an English prof.

    Surely this fact in itself is some kind of riposte to the people who say we (humanities academics) have failed in our capacity as public intellectuals.

    It seems like an interesting footnote to the debates that fed certain chapters of ‘The Employment of English’ and your review of ‘Anxious Intellects’ a couple of years ago.

    Are you planning to write an article on blogging? I realize it’s mainly a fun hobby, but it seems like something interesting is going on here.

    Posted by Amardeep Singh  on  06/02  at  04:25 AM

  6. An article on blogging?!?  Ahhhh, now I have serious blog anxiety!  --Really, Amardeep, thanks very much (and thanks for reading that print material of mine, too), but for now I think I’ll leave this as “fun hobby,” alongside the hockey and the drumming.

    Posted by  on  06/02  at  08:11 AM

  7. Yep, I know what you mean. I’m down to my last unemployment check and at this point, it looks like I’ll soon be sleeping on a friend’s counch.

    And yet, I keep checking my Sitemeter stats and wondering why my hits are down. Go figure.

    Posted by Susie from Philly  on  06/03  at  10:24 AM

  8. The distinguished levels of your band performance is hilarious.LOL. It reminds of mine school days ! Great post..Thanks!smile

    Posted by New York Cinematographer  on  07/06  at  05:28 AM

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