How One Becomes What One Is
There are so many things more fearsome than “success” or “failure” it’s hard to understand even how they’d be noticed.
There you go. Abstraction gets no satisfaction!
Anyway success and failure are complicated machines, and probably the best thing is to take them apart and lay out their pieces side by side and understand that none of them does anything on its own. A paratactic life, one damn thing after another, must be one route into the healthy stoicism that lets you sleep at night. It’s not like I’m still waiting for adulthood—though graduate school is an easy place to forget that.
Once this teaching stint is up I’ve signed a contract to go work for a mining company during the three summer months, for more money than I’ve ever seen collected in my life. And that will my last chance at this kind of thing for a good while, because mining companies like everyone else are in the land of layoffs and my job is more or less to set up their office to run without me, so they will never have to pay someone like me that kind of money again. Class traitor....
