"Your 20s are about having the courage to write a frightful first draft"

I hope to share this snippet from the book "101 secrets for your twenties" by Paul Angone*:

"I think most of us went into our 20s expecting a box office smash, when instead our twentysomething story is not even going to make it to the theaters. At least not yet.

As a writer, I used to be bummed about all the time and effort I spent writing hundreds of pages that would never see the light. But as I grew as a writer I learned that you have to write a lot of really atrocious first drafts before you can find the story you need to tell.

Our 20s are the same way. For many years it will be about getting words down on paper that we'll edit later. Plans will fail because that's part of Frightful First Draftdom. But five rewrites later, we'll lean back and say, "Wow, that's actually not too bad."

We have to be willing to allow ourselves to write some terrible first drafts.

You can't have a good story without a good struggle."

*Angone, P. (2013) 101 secrets for your twenties. Kindle edition. (Learned the importance of doing citations when I was asked for the reference for a quotation I quoted on this blog a few years ago but because there was no citation, I had no idea where I got it from!)

Faith and Partiality

You need great faith to do a thesis. When you have been playing epistemic games for so long and you still don't have a framework to advance forward. You need faith that the moves you make now will eventually lead to something greater.

You need great partiality to do thesis. When your first reaction when reading a scholar's work is disgust, you need to remove yourself from your ideological box, to read the work without bias and come to a fair conclusion.

Patriotism

Patriotism transcends rationality, the rationality of this world. We may be inclined to say "my country is the best in the world", the way we say "I have the best husband/wife in the world." We have simply chosen to love the one we have somehow become intimately bound with exclusively and intensely. And we are willing to lay down our lives for things that do not benefit us immediately, like for our "imagined political community", we are willing to make sacrifices that can benefit this mass of people, some of whom we know but the majority, whom we will never know in our lifetime. How did these strange attachments developed? Maybe it was through logical reasoning, maybe it was our cultural memory or the daily interactions with these people who formed our imagined community. But it does seem that there is a spiritual element to patriotism!

the most astute and sophisticated analysis

"There is an ethical paradox in patriotism which defies every but the most astute and sophisticated analysis." - Niebuhr, Reinhold

Thank you so much for making me feel better about struggling with this concept of "patriotism"!

Why reading is so tough?

I think I am starting to understand why reading is so tough for me...

My mind is burnt and I find that I cannot read an essay, because following an argument, especially if one builds it up slowly, is extremely effort-requiring. And I find that I cannot do it when I'm mentally exhausted. *sigh* I'm thinking it's because I'm not a naturally argumentative person, and I don't think logically. So I require more effort than the normal person to follow arguments... That's why I find it so difficult to read such essays... You know as compared to relaxing type of readings...

What shall I do?

Adventure Seeking

Pursuing a graduate degree is at once difficult and exciting because one often ventures into uncharted territory! No one seems to have walked this path before, and one has to walk it out alone using clues from many sources as their guide, making many decisions along the way!

Philosophy?

One thing about studying patriotism is that I find myself leaving the comforts of analyzing empirical studies and into the realm of conceptual, theoretical and philosophical studies!

There is surprising little empirical studies but many many conceptual studies...

I squirm at this unfamiliarity.

But will now enter into the realm of further complexity.

It's time to "complexify" my thesis!

And... actually it's true. I didn't notice it until now. I was trying my best to simplify the complex ideas of patriotism... but my examiners felt very uncomfortable with that and felt I was prematurely doing so... So... now I'm off the venture into the unknown and uncertain world of complexity! God, be my guide!