Strongly Worded

Intellectual Lethargy

I may have mentioned a few billion times that my job is easy lately (and has been for some time). My latest projects? Snoozefests. Seriously. My day consists of bursts of work interspersed with guilt, snack breaks, obsessive email/voicemail checking, self-loathing, and bloggish activities. While sitting at my desk, I'm conscious of how little brain power my tasks require. I feel ashamed (so many of my friends have comprehensive knowledge of computers/genetics/ autism/public health/education--what's wrong with me?) and also enraged (I've worked too hard academically/professionally to be doing this).

But then last week I engaged in some e-banter with a friend of a friend (FOF). Said e-banter was witty and pithy and lovely and clever. The conversation with the FOF (who, I should note, is an extraordinarily successful scientist-cum-business-mogul) made me smile and wonder what hilarity I'd spout next. I realized how rarely I get to feel clever during the work day.

Now. As you know, it has been seven days since I last watched cable television, and I already feel much smarter. I went to the library today and filled my Jay McCarroll Project Runway tote bag to the brim with books. Afterwards I came home and did some desk re-org, and I came across some of my grad school papers. One of them was quite brilliant. It included the phrase "mining for pathology", which the professor called "very nice". He also liked the part where I asserted that "inappropriate application of clinical knowledge serves to incorrectly define social problems as individual mental health problems." (Wow. I never thought that sentence would see the light of day.) I used the word "bellicosity", probably for the last time.

I sat on the floor and re-read this paper as if it were written in another language, one that I could understand but no longer speak. I felt proud of myself and also deeply sad that my day-to-day life neither requires or builds on whatever brain power I have left. I totally get that it's unusual for people in non-academic jobs to think as much and as hard as we all do in school. And I don't think I'd be happy working in a think tank or in an environment where people were calling me on inconsistencies in my logic or citations.

Still. I've always thought about my dream job in terms of the environment (physically lovely and fast-paced), the people (emotionally lovely, diverse, supportive, and plentiful), and the tasks (managing, organizing, and communicating). I never really thought too much about wanting a job to be hard. But I wish my job were harder. And thus I'm trying to supplement it with brain-fortifying extra curriculars. The blog. Hopefully teaching a class. And I'm trying to recycle a grad school paper for submission into a professional journal (with extraordinarily limited circulation). If my abstract is chosen, I get $150.

That would pay for almost two months of cable, you see.

Posted by Dori at 9:00 PM