draggin'

I’m really dragging today, to the point where I am feeling a little bit hopeless about slogging through my remaining month here.

One thing I’ve learned about myself in the past two years is that I’m often enchanted by new ideas, but that my enthusiasm is ephemeral and easily lost. I really like the concepts behind big projects, but I hate the tediousness of executing the details and will pretty much find any excuse to wiggle my way out of them. I’ve learned this the hard way at work. I’m rapidly drawn into new projects, get excited about them, and love to bounce around strategy and concepts. But, since I’m more often than not the lowest man on the totem pole, the mundane work of execution primarily falls to me.

And I hate it. Which is why I employ an army of procrastination techniques meant to ward off the inevitable boredom: news, med blogs, fashion blogs, facebook, gossip websites. It’s junk food for the brain. Honestly, if my gluttonous consumption of random websites actually did entail calories, I’d be catastrophically obese right now.

In no way do I think I’m above the kind of entry-level work I’m expected to do. I understand you spend years in the trenches in order to get to the top. It’s just that I’m alternately bored and lethargic…and so have serious difficulty forcing myself to execute.

This is a major reason why I decided to go back to graduate school. I’ve missed the challenge and stimulating debate of the academic environment, where intellect is the most valuable commodity, rather than my ability to book a meeting or write a memo.

Yet, I’ve got to steer clear of thinking of grad school as an intellectual playground of sorts, where I can just gleefully leap around a rhetorical jungle gym. I will have to write a thesis, and then someday (hopefully) a dissertation.

And while there will be plenty of the interesting discussion and research, the only way I’ll motor through is to shut off the web and wade through the tedious tasks, one at a time. It's true: I've got to grow up and actually do stuff I don't like.

So here’s to checking things off the to-do-list! But in the meantime, let me check Facebook just...once....more….


Oh, and just for kicks, here's a picture of the most handsomeof my three male roommates:

(Victor "Victorious" Hugo)

According to this recent article, http://neuroanthropology.net/2009/05/28/caught-in-the-net-the-internet-compulsion/ , my internet addiction may be soon recognized as a legitimate mental illness-guess I am crazy, after all!