31 October 2003: Change

Lots of good conversation in my life lately. Last Friday I met Argus for lunch and talked about writing, then Friday night I met up with Wonderboy and we went to Sherpa and Syrinx’s monthly salon. It was the best gathering I’ve been to in a while, and the best salon yet (Sherpa thought so, too). The conversation went on until midnight. The theme was discontinuity: we discussed the sudden stops, interrupts, and changes that had been happening in our lives lately. Everyone there had pretty major ones going on. People coming to the end of projects and phases, groping for what’s next. Wonderboy has split up with H-Bomb; Sherpa is switching back from filmmaking to live theatre; ya’ll know about my many transitions already.

Or do you? It occurs to me that I haven’t yet formally announced my Big Plan in this journal. I’ve had so many conversations about it lately that I’ve started taking it for granted that all my friends know it – but that’s not the case, as I was reminded on Saturday night when I made reference to it in conversation with Lexicat and it was the first she’d heard of it. The conversation with Lexicat, by the way, took place at Zebra’s housewarming party, in her delightful new San Francisco apartment. A small, quiet gathering, much of which was spent playing Lunch Money, a card-based strategy game that simulates a vicious bloody brawl among eight-year-old Catholic schoolgirls.

So here’s the Big Plan: I’m going to get a Ph.D. Come January, I switch from being a very-part-time student at Vista Community College to being a full-time student there. In four semesters, I’ll have an A.A. (Associate of Arts, not Alcoholics Anonymous, Attitude Adjustment, or Ardent Admirer) in Liberal Arts, all credits transferable to the B.A. program of my choice. Should take me another two years after that to get the B.A., and then it’s straight on into grad school. I’m looking at spending the next ten to twelve years as a full-time student. And when I’m done, I’ll have a Ph.D., which will be in Psychology or some customized variant like Somatic Psychology.

The Ph.D. will be useful in getting my nonfiction books published and read, and in marketing whatever classes and workshops I might want to teach as an extension of what I publish. As you might have guessed, I have some radical ideas about psychology, cognition, and education. I’m a man with a mission; I’ve got memes to spread. A decade of school will give me the time and opportunity to further explore, develop, and refine my ideas; the Ph.D. itself will give me enough mainstream credibility to inject them into culture, and even to get paid for doing so.

This is a giant step, a giant commitment. When I get out of school, I’ll be in my mid-to-late forties. But I’ll be in my mid-to-late forties in a dozen years anyway, whether I go to school or not. And this is the right path for me, the direction everything in my life has been pointing. What other field could so perfectly bring together the bizarre miscellany of skills and experience I’ve accumulated over the years?

Where will it take me? I can’t know for certain. My current very-long-term post-Ph.D. post-publication plan is to start an alternative private school for grades six through twelve. That’s about 16 to 20 years down the road right now, and a lot could (and will) change in that time – but don’t let that stop you from giving some thought to what you might want to come and teach. (No, Lila, you can’t teach that.)

And whither then, I cannot say.

Lexicat came over Monday afternoon and we sat on the couch and talked and talked and talked, about books and plans and semantics and the Universe and culture and consciousness and God.

Dragon Lady starts her new job on the 5th; today I tell my two remaining reading students that my last day teaching them will be the 21st.

Tonight I’m going over to Wonderboy’s house to cook together and talk about the Kabbalah and whatever else the conversation brings us to; this may become a regular event, with more people involved.

And this morning, a change in the weather added three new haiku to the bottom of the long-neglected Haiku page.