Stop the World...I Want to Get Off

I'm resenting work so much right now. Not so much my actual work, but just the fact of work. There's always a low level of job-related discontent bubbling within me, but knowing that I'm going back to school this fall is making it exponentially worse. Especially now that I've got my class schedule set and a lease signed for my apartment. I've mentally quit my current job and having to physically come in and work is annoying the crap out of me.

Part of it is that the job isn't challenging me, it isn't in an area that interests me greatly, and overall, it simply isn't the right job for me longterm. (I do love the people I work with, though, which goes a long way toward keeping me content.) But a lot it is just that I am a very selfish person and I resent that fact that I have to give eight hours of my day (more like 9.5 by the time you include drive time) to this company, instead of spending them doing things I want to do for myself. And that they're the best, most alert, most mentally acute hours of the day...I think of more things that I want to write about, that I want to research, that I want to learn to do, between 9am and noon than any other time of the day. By the time I get through the afternoon at work, fight the traffic to get home, and fix myself something to eat, I'm too tired to do any of the things that I was so excited about in the morning, but couldn't do because I was at work.

Working a second-shift job wouldn't help, though, I don't think...I don't want to give up my evenings, either. Evenings are when TV shows are on, they're when my online friends get online, they're when my RL friends are free to go to movies or hang out and play Xbox.

I know, I know. Welcome to The Real World, to Adulthood, to Having Responsibilities. You know what? You can have it. I like my fake world in which I have the freedom to work when I want to work, as long as the work gets done by whatever necessary deadline. The freedom to work an hour here, an hour there, and do whatever in between. (I know jobs like this exist, but they always seem to involve a lot of self-marketing and stuff that I hate even more than being tied to a desk 8 hours a day.) I don't really have a short attention span, but I do like to shift between interests a lot, and that's something I haven't been able to do anywhere but school. I LOVED undergrad because I could go from a class in psychology straight to one in art history, then jump over to Old Testament, and down to biology. I actually didn't like biology that much, but I did like the variety it added to my life. People don't always understand that when I say I'm bored, it's really because I'm missing that variety, not because I don't have enough to occupy my time.

I'm a little afraid that grad school won't be as great as I'm hoping it is, because it's more focused and I won't have as much opportunity to take classes outside my discipline. (This was a major factor in the decision to only pursue an M.A., not a Ph.D.--as much as I love English literature, I don't know that I can see myself spending five or six or seven years studying it and only it.) I'm also afraid that grad school is only a delaying mechanism, and that two years from now, I'm going to be exactly where I am now, with the same discontentment and resentment.

But I'm going to cross that bridge when I come to it.


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