Friday, June 02, 2006

chapter eleventy jillion in my ongoing battle with accepting adulthood

I've officially been too good.

Not good in a particularly polished or exceptional way, mind you; good in a behaving properly, working hard, playing by the rules kind of way. Today I discovered that all my accumulated vacation time will expire in July. My boss' reaction was to tell me to take off a bunch of days in June so that I could get my money's worth. My reaction was to sigh and say, with complete sincerity and in no way a suck-up measure, "I just have too many projects in the air to take them."

Ew.

In addition to work, I've actually been reading for class. Reading the way you have to read in grad school, where you actually read all the words as opposed to the first paragraph and last paragraph of each chapter, taking notes the entire time while swilling belly-swelling amounts of tea. Did you know that the destruction of kingdom of Kongo is an excellent representative of political integration of indigenous African peoples and the Atlantic slave trade? I DO. I know a whole lot more shit, too. Graduate school in the social sciences is entirely about taking the most passionate, inflamatory subjects and bloating them with statistics and circle jerking-PhDs so that the poor student grows to hate academia and prays for the sweet, familiar embrace of white-collar office life. At least, unlike the Atlantic slave trade, TPS reports have not been around since 1441.

I've been such a good little student and good little worker bee that I haven't had time for any of the things that make blog entries fun, like making out with a stranger only to discover he's (eek!) an intern or taking pretty pictures or spilling coffee on famous-for-Washington celebrities in Starbucks. No sin, no scandal, no controversy. Really, since seeing J on Monday, no fun.

I am getting crunked tonight. And I'm not thinking about sugar plantations ONCE. Take that, maturity!

2 comments:

Lindsay said...

So true about grad school. Before I went to LSE I thought I was going to go on to a PhD and teach and blah blah blah...and then I got there, saw what a life of academia entailed and decided that I could not wait to get an office job...

I-66 said...

Wait. I was supposed to be swilling tea?!

I suppose that was the problem...