Guest Post: Bored

I'm not entirely certain Anon. 5:04 makes total sense. But she/he did make me laugh. Parsimonious rejection of explanatorily impotent entities? Prophylactic antidepressants? I love it. -- PGOAT

I can't believe that I just read that post about why there was a deadline of Oct. 10, and that I'm now responding to it. I must be very bored. I hope most of you are posting out of boredom too...my worry is that the job market has made many of the people anxious and compulsive in a way that would place them along some clinical continuum. The job market SUCKS. My happy story for finishing my dissertation is not the great work that came close to deadline, but the three months of regularly remembering and even saying outloud to myself that I had actually finished the program. It was very awesome--phenomenologically like getting short flashbacks of a strong opioid drug. Everything before that, though, was for two years bad or terrible or sucky. Makes people who are confident to the point of unpleasant start to treat animals kindly, become so anxious that they lose a great deal of weight, develop self-effacing humor, and almost make you like them. Like Palin. I almost like her. Have you noticed that she is not hot anymore? Strange things happen when your spirit gets crushed, especially if you already don't believe in spirits on account of their failure to meet any reasonable standard for explanatory potency. Speaking of entities you rejected as a teenager on grounds of parsimony, you will likely try out an abortive prayer or two in the final weeks of your defense.

If you get a good VAP job, which I did, you might surprise yourself by being happy. I did at least. If I had had to jump around for several--or even two, who knows?--years as an adjunct it would probably lose its charm. But for a while there you feel like a professional, and, in the context of grad life and debt and collection agencies, rich to the point where you think you might donate some of that extra cash to Oxfam, and then don't. ...

No moral--just some reflections on a mixed experience that, I know, if often not nearly as leavened as mine has been by fairly pure enjoyment in the subject itself. If I had the anxiety problems that all of you seem to have, I probably wouldn't have liked grad school as much as I did. I went on antidepressants very early, though, as a prophylactic to the misery I saw coming.

Sorry, I bet I made those who were previously anxious bored. Read it again maybe before your defenses for its anxiolytic properties?