Sitting here at the Los Angeles airport, it is only properly inappropriate that I ritualize my transition into the unknown. While this may seem trite, or at least a well-worn cliché, that is because it is well worn—worn by every graduate, like a pair of inappropriately low slung jeans—and every person who does not know what they want to do with their lives from their first cognizant moment (read: their parents planned their careers from conception). So this is an exercise in exploration, and most importantly, in keeping my mind going now that college is winding down, and come June, I will have next to no cerebral occupations, aside from the ever stimulating needs of the populace at the grocery store where I work.
My liberal arts degree allows me to know of Georges Bataille, who came up with the concept of non-productive expenditure. He says that under the direction of capitalism, while our society ostensibly values people and things that are “productive,” that do something or make something, simultaneously and paradoxically, our conception of the sacred is based upon non-productive expenditure, that is, that which does not advance or create anything useful in a conventional way, and at worst, destroys or consumes the useful: i.e. resources, energy, and the various creative juices of our society. Such acts and endeavors, among them non-procreative sex, sacrifice (especially that of one J.H. Christ), and poetry, are considered sacred, precisely because they capture our attention as being non-productive. This seems to explain a lot about our society for me, and links Christianity, pornography and cults in the most interesting approach I’ve encountered. I would add Facebook and other such energetic and social black holes that the 21st century has created for us as non-productive expenditures, that which essentially does nothing, but yet capture our energy and rapt interest just for that reason.
That said, while Bataille considers these things sacred, and I can’t disagree, I am constantly looking for productive expenditure, to lure me away from such “sacred” vices. I am the queen of finding “productive” ways to waste time, once I become personally shamed by the hours passed doing absolutely nothing productive, academic or otherwise. My personal favorites are knitting, baking and running, all done when I have the most papers to write or at least two exams in the next week. Such productive activities give me something to show for hours spent furiously not word processing jewels of academia, but perhaps furiously Facebook chatting. This blog will give me a productive outlet. For now, for not writing my ever-looming undergraduate thesis that will give me the keys to the world (of unemployment), and later, in said unemployment or worse— the slave labor known as unpaid internships—in order to keep the proverbial ball rolling, to keep the cerebral stone from too much moss.
