I love my job. It’s cool and glamorous; it’s got no set timetables, hardly any supervision. I would pay to do it. A lot of people do. Instead I’m getting paid for it. It involves thinking, a lot of thinking. You read around using the theories that you choose. The whole job is like a heated conversation amongst a lot of very learned and mostly fascinating people. Thinking, blue sky thinking, progressive thinking, historical thinking, sociological thinking… and communicating and finding out stuff. It takes a lot of skill, a lot of savvy too. You need a “feel for the game”.
Some say it’s a cult. Well it pretty much is: lots of unwritten rules and commandments to live by. You develop new friendships and that’s an essential part of the job. Drinking coffee and chatting for two hours a day is normal, expected. You co-operate all the time. You co-author papers, you plan conferences in exiting places and you read and you contribute to debate. There is no activity I like more than my job, except hanging out with friends. And even then we do pretty much the same things as I do for a living: conversation.
One day, you’re given the opportunity to take up the same profession as Aristotle and Marx. It makes you cry. There is no job in the world you would rather do. You would be miserable as hell if it was stripped away from you. The relationship is neurotic, abusive. It eats away you life and exiles you from family and friends. But you love it so much that you don’t care. Well you almost don’t care, when your mum is crying on the phone a thousand miles from here. And you miss all the friends you’ve made in all these countries and you wish they were all here. But that will never be.
P.S. Encore un chouette article chez Profgrrrrl.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment