Principles of Accounting

My school requires its students to take something called a First Year Seminar. It's a seminar-style course that's taken during the first year. It is on one of a variety of subjects, ranging from baseball, to acting, to fine-tuning one's bullshit-meter, to accounting. The latter, unfortunately, is the one that I'm taking.

I say unfortunately not out of hatred or contempt for accountants or for the accounting discipline itself. I say it because I feel that I have been dealt misfortune by being enrolled in an accounting course. It is, of course, of my own doing--at one time I thought it might be interesting, and if not interesting at least useful. What has come from it has been nothing but stress, worry, intense feelings of intellectual inadequacy, and even more intense feelings of regret. It is not necessarily productive to worry, but the soul needs worry, if only to be able to recognize that something in one's life is doing harm to them. There are concepts in the discipline of accounting which I am not willing to care about at this point in my life, in spite of the fact that this is the time for me to care about the concepts, as they are relevant to me right now. But they will never be relevant again, and although this is a despicable practice, I am already acting as if they are not presently relevant--after all, are they really? Insofar as I am in a class on the subject, yes, but in my life separate from this course, out in the real world, the accounting discipline holds no importance in my life as it stands now.

I will not lie and say I never enjoyed it. At the start, I really did like the practice of accounting, back when it involved the simple duties of filling out balance sheets, preparing income statements and attending class four times a week. Soon, however, the complexity and the tedium were increased exhaustively, and it soon became apparent to me that, at some point, I no longer had the desire or will to take accounting seriously, and I realized that I was not the type of person who becomes an accountant. It requires the type of precision that comes from a high tolerance for tedium--and I hardly tolerate tedium. I can't say for sure what it is I am interested in--I could make some guesses, but they would be inconclusive and subject to change--but I can say for certain that I have no interest in the discipline of accounting. There's no shame, I suppose, in not being an accountant, just as there's no shame in not being anything else, and after all one person can only be so many things. I admit that I'm slightly ashamed at simply being apparently incapable, or at the very least unwilling, to perform towards a duty which had specifically been prescribed to me (that is, fulfilling the requirements of the accounting course itself, which I have performed remarkably poorly in,) and this fact, more than the fact that I do not enjoy accounting, is what provides me with such discomfort and upset. It is that I have been so poor in fulfilling my duties (both in this and, to an extent, in all of my other courses--but more on that another time) that puts me at unease.

I hate to be a failure, and I hate to have the grounds to call myself a failure. But what, in fact, are the grounds for failure? Is failure really the inability to be exceptional? Well, one can be exceptional, and that is certainly a resounding success, but it would be a logical fallacy to state that the opposite of being exceptional is being a failure. No, failure is simply what it is--the opposite of success. I suppose, then, that one could define success under personal, subjective parameters, and by that same token define failure similarly, but that to me is a cop-out. That makes it too easy to deem every failure a success, and to ignore the practical realities of failure. Failure, I suppose, is what you call it when your goals have not been met. That works well to an extent, because it makes failure a state of being as opposed to a value judgment--it allows for one to have tried as hard as they could and still have failed, and it makes it so that failure is tolerable, even forgivable. But is the aim to make failure tolerable or forgivable? Or is failure something which should not be tolerable or forgivable--a sort of mark on one's conscience that is there to haunt and remind of that which went wrong. Perhaps what failure really is, then, is what happens when one does not perform to the best of their abilities. This is troubling in that it is practically irreconcilable with that which is out of the operator's control--"acts of god" as it were, or things which make it hard to perform at one's best--because, if one performs at their best in the face of adversity and they end up failing anyway, then the definition falls apart. For instance, one could fail, in an objective sense, by losing in a game of catch, even if they were playing as well as they could, simply because they were, perhaps, blind, and could not see the ball they were catching. A ridiculous example, yes, but it does bring up an important part of the definition and it may point me towards my most complete one yet--it brings up the idea that, perhaps, failure occurs on more than one level. I will say, then, that at its most basic and distilled essence, failure is an inability to live up to the standards of success in a given endeavor. This can be reconciled with the duality of purpose that I mentioned earlier, and with the circumstances beyond the operator's control which I likewise mentioned earlier. The former: one can obtain different outcomes based on different sets of standards. For instance, in one sense I may have failed at my accounting course in that I did not meet or approach my own standards, and at the same time I could succeed in my accounting course by not ending the course with a failing grade, i.e. by meeting the standards of success. Therefore, there can be personal failures and objective/practical failures, and the two are not mutually exclusive. The latter: circumstances beyond the operator's control can still result in an objective or practical success or failure, even if from a personal perspective the outcome is different. For instance, I could say that my chronic depression and insomnia have contributed to my personal failure in accounting, even if they did not change the objective success (or, perhaps, a term like un-failure would be more accurate, albeit nonexistent.) I can't, honestly, go any further with this definition. I am the sole interlocutor and have nobody to test my ideas against. Perhaps I ought to write a dialogue between myself and Socrates, testing the notions of failure and success (yuk yuk yuk.)

Anyway, I basically feel like a failure because I have performed under the standards at which I would like to have met or exceeded. This isn't so bad at all--ultimately, in a pragmatic sense, what matters isn't how I feel I did, but how I actually did--but what sticks with me is not whether or not I failed (and a C, even if it disappoints, is hardly a failure,) but whether or not I feel like I failed. This could mean that my standards for success are unrealistic and need redefinition--after all, can I really expect myself to complete and turn in every assignment perfectly, to understand each concept, to get an A on each test and quiz, and to be a productive member of the classroom environment, all while struggling to adapt to a new environment, dealing with the problems of long-term depression, struggling to both stay awake during the day and to sleep at night, struggling with feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt, and generally being maladjusted and disaffected? The A student is the exceptional student, but not the average, and not necessarily even the ideal. We can't all be "A students" all the time. I was in high school, I'm not right now, I may be later on in my life. I ought to be content with that, and in time I may be. No mistake is too large or too unbearable that it can't be remedied by careful and appealing rationalization. It may be an uncomfortable truth, but it is a truth nonetheless--we cope and move on my rationalizing and by accepting our failures and successes. It is better to live with a failure and to not allow it to hold your life back than it is to become consumed by failure and to allow it to ruin your life. No life deserves being ruined, and nobody's life can be ruined without their consent. Again, this all feels like rationalization, but it's a conclusion that I can see the value in. We must move on, even if we are aiming at nothing but contentment. I could question why we must move on, and I have, but that, I feel, is for another post.

I had homework for my accounting course. I struggled with it and didn't complete it--I began it, but have only incomplete work for both problems on the assignment. I felt awful when I finally gave up on it, but in retrospect I feel like it simply doesn't matter how poorly I did on that assignment. It is, perhaps, more important that I spent the early morning listening to jazz, reading Time magazine, and writing my mind out on my new blog. I love blogging--I love the idea of the blog, I love the antecedents to the blog, and I love the fact that it's so damn easy to do this shit.