Clearly there’s a pattern in my postings. Whenever I try to don the “Professor” hat when it comes to blogging, I usually come off as pretentious or smug. You know what kind of Professor I mean, tweed jacket and pipe sitting in a library. But what consequences occur when the Professor hat is Oxford donned? (groan, bad pun, BAD!)
Well, it sort of works like this. For me, the “Professor Hat” is like the potion that Dr. Jekyll drinks to become Mr. Hyde. Only instead of becoming a brute who bludgeons children I become a pretentious git. Whenever I start talking about “philosophy in the boudoir” or “pipes”, you know these are warning signs that I’m not myself. Whenever I mention these I tend to go to the dark side of philosophy, thinking my words are gold.
What’s even more embarrassing is that whenever I put on my “Professor Hat” I usually make an arse of myself in front of more experienced intellectual bloggers. They expose me as the Emperor who has No Clothes, and thus the cycle of sulking and lack of self worth begins. But is there a way I can destroy the Professor Hat, throwing it into the fires of Mt. Doom so it will never again trouble me with its nefarious power?
I guess I have to stick to what Geek Philosophy really means instead of donning the Professor Hat and staying away from associated “Clive James in the Library” sort of imagery that reeks of pretention. How could I go from an insightful Geek Philosophy post to something so smug as a subversion of the Otaku Room Post which may have been feeding my ego?
I guess it’s about restraint. In my years as an intellectual I have become familiar with being roasted by other intellectuals, most famously by Germaine Greer at a Q&A. Maybe I need thicker skin, I won’t go into hiding this time though. Not this time.
Because experience tells me that going into hiding only makes people think I’m a wuss. There are times where I slip up, and there are times when I am insightful. I aim to be more insightful than slipping up in my blogging. Maybe I just need to swallow my pride and burn that Professor’s Cap once and for all, before it gets worse. I can always be an intellectual without having a persona, it’s not something I need, and it’s dishonest to put up a facade. My readers deserve the real me, not some Tolkienesque Professor clone type who smokes his pipe like a chimney.
the key here is to try as hard as possible not to take yourself seriously and look at your mistakes as learning experiences. I’ve never been an intellectual, but I used to really want to be, and you know what that means XD. I had to learn to stop taking anything I say seriously, and also remember that I can be wrong (and usually am). Shit, you hand;ed it perfectly in the fact that you are even willing to recognize yourself as making a mistake – that’s nothing but honorable.
Er, sorry if I came off as a douche bag. It was a misreading on my part in that I thought you were being critical of the people, not the ‘thing’ itself [maybe you are, in fact?]. Sorry about that. But anyway, like DB says, we take it all with a grain of salt, call it SRS BSNS, and walk away (you know my opinion on that): we all know how well intelligent we are, what matters is being humble about our pretension. Directly criticizing the actions of others is tricky stuff, so we must tread lightly, but being self righteous is not a bad thing, and although self censorship is challenging to master – when to speak and when not to speak – there’s that fine line. One line elicits Ultimate RAEG Works, the other, annoyingly low blog hits. We just play The Game. Do you have gtalk? Add me – the stuff is in my contact section.