Overcoming the boredom

I am trying really hard to be interesting, lighthearted and funny, and I don't mean just in this medium but also in my regular life. So far, it's not exactly working. Spring is springing, and I'm very excited about that, so much so that I would say I have a bit of spring fever; I've missed spring these last eight years of east coast living, where spring and summer sort of melt into fog and despair and then fall comes. Fall is lovely, but not to someone who loves the spring.

Despite this feeling of pending growth, greenery and change, I am cynical and nasty, judgemental and paranoid. So I have all the contradictory emotions going full strength in my life blender and it's not making for a yummy smoothie. In fact, it's more like nuts and gum ("Mmmmmm. Nuts and gum, togther at last." Homer Simpson. I don't hold with his world view on this one.) or fish heads and cinnamon, or any other incongruous mixture you can put together.

I suspect, it's the waiting for the stupid job. See, the job will either mean that I'm back in the proverbial academic saddle: applying for grant money, teaching, running committees....well, yes, running them. I'm not usually on a committee for very long before I end up running the thing. And the research, that too, and lots of it: grad students, undergrad students, Research City. It's a devil I know, and it's a devil that's a fuck of a lot of work, if you want to do a really good job. I am a bit torn, thinking that if I don't have it then I don't have that workload any more and that might not be so bad. At the same time, if I don't have it then I will not find another job with the same level of autonomy again. I need autonomy. I need to tell people what to do, and I need to be told what to do as little as possible. Less, even. I am not so good with being told what to do, I don't really play well with others and I don't like to share my toys. I was a good kindergarten student but only because I was trying to figure out how to beat the system from inside.

So the waiting, it's bugging me. I know that candidate number four is finally being interviewed this week, and then there's an ACS conference in Chicago that some people are going to so the committee won't be able to meet next week, so it'll be the week after before they'll meet, discuss.....agh. It takes forbloodyever and it should have taken 2.5 weeks total. This is a little thing that annoys me too: the waiting. Is everything this slow? Because I will kill people if things are slow. In addition to my other attractive traits (not playing well or sharing) I also have no patience, I respond emotionally before I respond analytically....oh, on the up side, you get both responses. First, I have a meltdown, and then I step back and analyze each step of the destructive process. You'd have noticed this if you'd read more than the last paragraph of this narrative blog thing I've been keeping.

There's the waiting contributing to my current mood, and there's the knowledge that there are 3.5 weeks of classes left, and a final exam not until April 20th. More waiting. But classes almost done, it's like hanging a pair of Manolo Blahniks in front of a socialite (the carrot/donkey analogy, it's not working for you either, is it? I'll think of something better) anyway, I look forward to the end of classes in April with the utmost anticipation. Will the day never come? and then it does. And in the meantime the three of us who teach the first year course are bickering about how to teach the organic chem part (and why they refer to it as orgo I do not know but it bugs the hell out of me and I never say it, but all the students do. Where does that terminology come from?) and what the book does and what we're going to do....ad infinitum. Thing is, I'm getting ahead of them in my lectures because I use powerpoint and they don't. It's not a big deal but it's adding to the stress right now and I'm pretty sure I don't need it. In the big scheme of things no, of course, it's nothing. The small scheme is the immediate scheme, as always.