le linguistique

This is a post I started a few weeks ago and just finished today, long after my trip to Canada. This weekend is Thanksgiving, which deserves to be spent in the US, not America's Top Hat.

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This weekend I am going to Quebec (the city, and also the state, I guess), Canada to present a paper at a linguistics conference. Why are they having a symposium on Hispanic linguistics in French-speaking capital of North America? Good question.

Two years ago I might have actually been excited to spend the weekend at a conference hearing "well-known" academic people talk about linguistics, but now the only reason I am going is to go to Quebec. I have always wanted to go to the good parts of Canada (not an oxymoron), and since I'm getting paid for it, I guess I'll put up with giving a 20 minute presentation on something I've lost all interest in. Think of it as sitting though a two-hour timeshare pitch just to get a free vacation.

So why have I lost all interest in something that two years ago I liked enough to pursue a postgraduate degree in? Basically, I got burned out. And I don't mean the Rain and Hail Crop Insurance "Oh I hate my job so much because it's so boring and I just wish they would fire me and Star 102.5 makes me want to drill out my ears" burned out, I mean really, honest-to-god burned out. Before last spring, I didn't even know that burn out had a real diagnosis. It does, and it sucks.

When I got to the point where my school/work was interfering with my quality of life, I knew it was time to quit. Who the hell wants to spend their weekends and evenings feeling guilty for not working or gauging the quality of their weekend on how "productive" it was. Maybe I was just studying the wrong thing that I didn't care about, but sorry academia, you can keep it. Also, the more cynical I got about my situation, the more I started to notice the dysfunctionality (at least in my eyes, probably some kind of justification mechanism) of the faculty and other students around me.

About that time, I realized I wasn't doing what I wanted to. I don't have any idea what that thing actually is, but at least now I know what it's not. So now I am just teaching: no classes, no Sunday night self-loathing guilty rage spirals. I mean, now I can even do something crazy like watch TV or go shopping. It might not be my ideal career path or life goal, but who even pretends to have that figured out at 24? At least I'm not doing what I hate.

In the end, some things might just be more important that prestige and productivity.