giovedì, giugno 06, 2013

Vanity unchained

Remind me to stop looking at job ads. I have a really great job. I'm overpaid and underworked, and getting all sorts of experience that will look better and better the more I stick it out. And I have enough friends working at charities and NGOs that I should be a little harder-nosed about how attractive it might be to work at one of them myself.

Toward the end of the quarter (now) is when the really interesting bit of my job crops up, which is writing big fancy involved market/financial reports about a few different sectors and countries that have to be pleasurably readable to Anglophones and ESL types alike. I tend to act a little put-upon around this time of the quarter and think I should probably feel stressed out because while I'm generally fairly indispensable at work (my best professional advice to anybody - manouevre yourself into indispensability) THIS shit is my real bread and butter - the font of all the other blessings that come along with the job.

But I'm not stressed, actually. In fact this "stressful" period is what keeps my brain young and sharp as the undergrad on speed I once was. Researching, writing, and writing so people want to read it. Chasing that high grade, which given my utter lack of long-term professional and academic ambition (I did my masters because it was cheap and gave me something to do with my spare time while I was still wrapped up in screwing Bluebird in Paris) was always an end in itself while I was in school - cracking the professorial code and deciphering how I needed to present arguments to get a nice ego-stroking A+. In this case there's no A+, just people active on the markets you cover treating your reports like a Bible, which is even better for the ego, and much, much better on the pocketbook.

So. Basically my professional life at the moment is successful because it lets me manifest my monstrous vanity. And there's only one thing to go to from there, of course. Do the same thing for an organisation with some sort of useful social purpose. Then - oh, then, what a constant sop to my vanity performing well would be! It would go from monstrous to gargantuan, behemothish, titanic, et cetera.

Maybe that's not such a good thing. So remind me to stop looking at job ads. Until the mortgage is paid, at least. 

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