What I was listening to while writing this.

Anger is like a man who wants to hit another and picks up a burning ember or excrement in his hand and so first burns himself or makes himself stink.

Resentment is like swallowing poison and waiting for your enemy to die.

~ Attributed to Buddha

It’s a busy time of year at the university. I had let a nice, not-so-important email languish for six days in my inbox due to being distracted by writing deadlines, class preparation here at the end-times, and other odds and ends.

Now that class was over at 5PM on Monday it was time to address this email. Someone is being nice; someone is looking out for me and doing a favor. I can’t believe it’s been six days.

I open the web browser and hit the wrong tab, and fall through a time vortex. Since I was testing my new linux build on an old desktop, I’m using the web email interface – all emails on the system are present. I land in 2011.

Looking around, I can’t believe these emails. All are from an ancient and foreign time where people are contacting me about debate tournaments, trips and partners confirmed and denied, and all sorts of questions and plans are being made. It is bustling. And familiar. And foreign as can be.

After clicking through these for a bit the tone of all administrative emails – actually most of these tournament-related emails is one of demand. Why are you doing this? What have you done? You haven’t done this. Why did you do this? The underwhelming support from administrators was everywhere; the overwhelming tone of mistake and error was everywhere.

It really made me angry. I sat there for a few minutes once again angry at the whole situation. I’d sacrificed my own time and money for years for a whole bunch of stupid people.

I could so clearly see the evidence in all these emails that the colonization of the tournament had completely corrupted debate as a rhetorical practice. It simply did not exist. I was willing myself to see it there even though it had been eaten up long ago. There was no debating going on only the tournament.

Over the past couple of days, the vibrations of that anger have come back to me, as I’ve been in a few conversations where people I wish I wouldn’t have to think about ever again were randomly brought up to me. All those awful tournament people. What a waste of time. These are the people who relish the tournament; it gives them meaning and defines who they are as people. They have nothing else. They only have value through the equivocation that the tournament and debate and being intelligent are all the same thing.

The anger is really directed at myself and the realization that confirmation bias gets all of us, in the end, in the beginning, and all throughout. I spun all the red flags and bad vibes into challenges that had to be put up with in order to do the sort of teaching I wanted to do. What a fool I was. I wasted so much of my time going to events, spending a ton of money, and encountering people who were not interested in much other than the inflation of their egos.

Like the blooming of plants anger comes around from time to time but we don’t think of it as a blooming at all. We don’t experience it as anything more than something like allergies, a force like a sneeze that takes over and has to come out. But in Buddhism it’s said that it should be treated more like a blossoming, something to experience and check out.

It wasn’t a pleasant experience but did get me thinking about rhetoric a bit. First, the difficulty of reaching anyone with this message from the world of debate. They will only read this as sour grapes. Most of my criticisms and suggestions about transforming debate were read at the time by debate people as things I was suggesting simply because they would help my team win more. They thought this because they could imagine no other motive for wanting to change the operation of debate contests.

Secondly it strikes me how incredibly difficult it is to write about waste in a way that makes the audience feel the waste. This too should be obvious given the climate crisis. The difficulty of persuading anyone that waste is destructive and damaging is beyond challenging. The existence of the fallacy of waste – known as the sunk cost fallacy – shows how difficult it is for people to accept waste. They will reason themselves into generating more waste in order to not let waste “go to waste.”

Anger blooms and blossoms. It’s suddenly there after the absence, like spring. Here it is. What happened to the time; where did this come from?

These lessons are good meditations. They hardly compensate for 10 years of misplaced time and energy. I am the only person on my campus who thinks about tournaments from time to time. Good. I’m always thinking about theorizing debating. Good too.

I told the email program to take all emails from 2009-2019 and delete them. It did it. I responded to the 6 day late email and went home.