All-consuming

I wonder if I'm turning into a workaholic. I spent between twelve and fourteen hours in class and studying almost every day this week (usually from 9 a.m. til 11 p.m.). It's not that I don't enjoy it - for the most part I do, the work's stimulating and I get a lot out of it - but it seems to be affecting my social life. Went out for dinner on Friday night to a sake bar in midtown with K; she was a bit frosty, mainly cos she hadn't seen me all week. Trouble is, this is just something I have to do right now; and these couple of weeks I have to prepare to lead the discussion in our colloquium, which means doing all the reading a week in advance. Perhaps this is what they mean by work-life balance, and maybe I need a bit more of the life side of things. Still. The bar was good, reasonably authentic (apart from the massive portions - not authentically Japanese, but welcome enough), and the booze was cheap. Got fairly hammered, blowing off steam I suppose.

I'm working through a 500-page book required for the Mod. Hist. colloquium right now, entitled Memory, History, Forgetting by some Frog philosopher by the name of Paul Ricoeur. To misquote and paraphrase Hermann Goering, "whenever I hear the words 'French philosopher' I reach for my revolver". It's not as bad as some - Derrida comes to mind - and it does have some interesting ideas, but in the general tradition of many theorists it's quite spectacularly badly written, long-winded, opaque, pretentious and generally annoying. If I might be allowed to quote another German of dubious moral heritage, Friedrich Nietzsche: "Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound strive for obscurity."