how to procrastinate industriously
a chronic overthinker's celebration of the Labor Day holiday paradox
I often joke to my colleagues that, between being a full-time professor and an active performer, my life is 1% performing, 9% practicing, and 90% emailing. Administrative work insinuates itself in nefarious ways; as in, Outlook's “schedule send” function is laughably performative. More recently, I discovered that there is now a “do not disturb” option in Outlook—also completely useless since I already silence email notifications on my phone but leave my email open on my computer.
Some people (you know who you are 😉) are very good at ignoring communication. Sometimes, it's because they get too much of it, sometimes because they don't want to deal with it. Honestly, I'd like to learn how to be better at being lazy about email so I could waste less of my practice time responding to “time-sensitive” emails that really can wait a few hours or even a few days. That being said, I do appreciate when people respond to me in a timely fashion.
Laziness comes difficultly, partly because 1) I'm a professional musician, and very few musicians go professional (as in, make 100% of their living from it) without a lot of hustling and 2) I don't have the Protestant work ethic, I have the 1980s Asian immigrant work ethic. What's scarier? The idea of hell or an angry Chinese mom? So, laziness has been beaten—figuratively and literally—out of me to the point where I'm studying Paul Lafargue's The Right to be Lazy to rationalize why it's OK (and even political!) to waste my time watching old SNL sketches when I could be working on my grant application.
For my own sanity, today's post will be short n’ sweet (yes, that's a Sabrina Carpenter reference). If you're facing a huge fiery pile of shit work, consider doing any of the activities on this eclectic (albeit highly curated) list that will help you be simultaneously lazy and industrious this week.
1. Watch Battlestar Galactica (2004)
The BG remake is one of Patrick's favorite TV shows, and he has tried to get me to watch it since we've been together. I'm not sure I'm as enamored of it as he is, but there are a lot of interesting cultural theory discussions to explore (anthropocentrism, ethics and morality, power, gender, race, colonialism, imperialism, other -isms) plus deep analyses of human emotion and behavior and what is sometimes beautiful and more times tragic about our irrationality. If you are a fan of BG, the beginning of the school year is the perfect time to re-watch the show. Of course, you may turn into these two:
Plus, read Franny Choi's The Rumpus article on BG, being Asian and female, and racializing thingness.
2. Practice making a new dish
Over the summer, I spoke with one of my students about why she was feeling overwhelmed by a number of things: career expectations, imposter syndrome, performance anxiety. You know, all the normal feelings grad students tend to have. My observation is that when students don't have a healthy outlet or an empathetic mentor to parse those feelings, they then bring that baggage into their professional lives and tend to have trouble mentoring their own students.
As she was explaining her anxieties, I noticed a common pattern. Something like imposter syndrome is (I think) very typical in younger people, since it's often triggered by a realization of inadequacy. It's normal to feel inadequate in school; that's the whole point of school (learning). It's also normal to feel inadequate when starting anything new—a degree, a job, or even a relationship.
Here's what I find really damaging about the way imposter syndrome isn't addressed, especially in the arts: inadequate knowledge/skills is not the same thing as inadequate self. However, in the performing and creative arts, the entanglement of self and product is so strong that “I don't know how to do this” translates into “I'm not good enough.”
To make a long story short, my suggestion to my student: Pick an activity she enjoys doing that is completely unrelated to music (and thus, completely detached from her sense of self). Practice doing that activity—each time, gaining new insight and being critical about where she needs to improve. The point is for her to learn how to separate ability from self-worth/identity, which I think is extremely difficult to do in a psychologically enmeshed context (the harp).
Because the activity I suggested to her was cooking, my advice for being lazy and industrious is to make a new dish—the goal being to learn how to make that dish well (practice-oriented), not to learn how to be a better cook (identity-oriented). In the late capitalist era of one-pot meals and DIY power bowls, technical food feels luxurious and artful. Artful things, while not exactly relevant to the masses, are a very small way to unflatten the world, to emphasize life's curious and confusing particularities against a blur of rapid consumption.
My dish of choice is the onsen tamago (Japanese “hot spring egg”). Super simple yet super difficult to get just right, and perfect on a bowl of cold ramen or hot white rice, seasoned with a little bit of good soy sauce and green onions from the garden.
3. Polish your flatware
A few years ago, I bought a new set of flatware, and despite my efforts (hand wash only!), the pieces are already scratched up. Polishing them is high on my “things I'll do when I'm procrastinating” list. Other unnecessary, monotonous things I like to do when I'm trying to avoid necessary work: skinning cooked chickpeas for hummus (totally superfluous but does make a creamier hummus); cleaning my email inbox (11,000+ unread emails); shredding cardboard for my vermicomposting bin; going through the pile of unopened junk mail on my desk.
In the spirit of Labor Day, I'd like to remind everyone that unnecessary, monotonous work is what allows modern consumer society to function. Women, people of color, and neo-colonial spaces are doing most of it in factories, fields and farms, sweatshops, offices, and homes. So, a procrastination task is, more realistically, foundational work that makes life livable, and thus, the type of labor that people with money love to outsource to people with less money. It is polishing flatware, cleaning the toilet, vacuuming, cleaning old grease on the stove range hood, re-sewing a hem on a shirt, sweeping the husks of bird seed off my patio, replacing the half-dead flowers on the dining table.
I don't think labor and work are the same. Labor seems to refer work that enables and maintains use/consumption. So, work can be labor, but it can also be other things, including having prestigious connotations like “life's work” or “work of art.” Steve Jobs, for example, ruined taught an entire generation that it can even be one's love, one's passion. Meanwhile, one can enjoy the fruits of one's labor, but saying “love thy labor as thyself” doesn't exactly sound right (and not just because it's a bad pun 😛).
While I don't have time to polish my utensils today—ironically, because I have too much non-labor work on my plate—I am looking forward to a Saturday morning when I can arm myself with a toothbrush and a box of baking soda. If I'm really dedicated, maybe I'll even go full micromesh pads.
Plus, watch Atashinchi's Mother discover the value of her labor, only for her family to turn against her.
That's all for this week! Tune in next time for something very different: why an industry-relevant performing career seems to be more and more necessary for DMAs entering the music academic job market.
✨ Noël Éternel 🎅🏼 🎄
This week's Corner of Wondrous and Powerful
👂🏼 Patrick recently introduced me to the album Kontrapunkt by German composer Markus Guentner. So delightfully noisy and definitely gives me early Burial vibes.
📖 Jay Wright's poetry anthology Transfigurations.
Who chooses me
to rise river-burdened, here,
where the sun has bent itself
and sprinkled ash about our doors?
To be a river spirit
I would have to burn this ash again
to moonrays and sunlight,
control the waves that push us higher
on the land.
I strain to clasp my dust again,
to make it mine,
to understand the claims the living
owe the dead.
- excerpt from “The Eye of God”
👀 Didi 弟弟 by Sean Wang. It's definitely a movie for other Asian American kids who will get the cultural references, and I may have had an existential crisis after watching it on Saturday. It's a bit like I Saw the TV Glow in the sense of being about lonely kids turning to technology to find their way, but in the case of Didi, the protagonist's emotional isolation is very much a product of intergenerational trauma specific to his race and culture (vs. queerness in I Saw the TV Glow).