Clutter

One of the occupational hazards of being trained as a grad student in English (or simply having a penchant for analysis) is that you.analyze.everything. We are finely trained semioticians: all things are signs; each thing is a text. We teach our students this, we study this methodology, and practice it in our work. It is easy to teeter over into over-analysis--picking apart things until they lose all their flavor; wrecking perfectly decent objects by peeling open their mysteries. Or worse, realizing that they have no mysteries, and all that is left is a symbolic carcass.

So, now, as I sit around with entirely too much times on my hands, I find that the tools I learned in grad school are making me nuts. I have turned all of that training onto my everyday life and find it maddening. I catch myself analyzing the patterns of...well, everything; each reading of signs (which may or may not be there) are cluttered with "meaning." And it's too much!!

Analysis often turns things acrid that don't need to be so; analysis can perhaps be channeled into goodness--or series of goodnesses. I live in this amazing place, my boyfriend still gives me butterflies when I see him, I'm healthy, and I'm very much alive and crazy about where my life is headed. No...there are things that don't need to be made bitter with too much chewing. Perhaps I am addicted to the analytic process, so if nothing is fueling it, I will gnaw on whatever is around me, whatever is local. The key is, I think, to keep it fueled and focused.

Having sickened of the sound of my own analytical voice rattling about in my head with nothing productive to bounce off of, and tiring of the intense insomnia that now accompanies it, I've decided to turn the sound back on the very thing that created it: I am beginning to process a new article on Susanna Kaysen's The Camera My Mother Gave Me. So, there.

I can't tell if I'm an addict or someone who is just a truly devoted semiotician. And there I go, over-thinking it again....