death-rays of ennui
2003-12-10
Boredom, we meet again. In the cold, slow hours of the day, you emerge from your secret hideout, ready to paralyse me with your death-ray of ennui. How many times have we come to this confrontation? How many times have we battled and raged? How many times have I resorted to the long toilet break, or succumbed to the desperate email addiction in some sad flight from your grasp?
Nearly a year has passed since I went to Canberra for a six-week summer internship in a government department. Nearly a year has passed since I was traumatised by the mind-numbing crush of office boredom I there encountered, and henceforth swore to myself ‘never again’. Now, in spite of safely residing back home, I feel the insidious, sickening crush of it edging back into my days. Like some mind-flaying flashback of memory unwanted, the long summer break has brought the boredom back, infecting all.
It comes whenever I catch a glimpse of my watch at work. As soon as my mind becomes cognisant of the time, I am cruelly transported into some torturous dimensional pocket where minutes are measured in hours, and hours in long, slowly grinding days. Of course, I only work on a casual basis. I should not be bored, right? Wrong. Taking on extra hours at the university library was a monumental disaster for my psyche.
The library becomes a tomb in the holidays. Barely a soul walks the corridors of the bottom floor. All but a few of the computer terminals in the hallways sit eerily black and vacant. Even the resident cricket in the stairwell has forsaken its singing in favour of an annual holiday to some far-off tropical getaway. I am loath to the leave the inter-library loans office in fear of confronting the sheer emptiness of the place; the emptiness that seems to have pervaded my own mind.
Being at work is like facing Chinese water torture at times, only instead of water droplets, it is the endless shuffling of paper and clicking of keyboards that drives me insane. I only endure this job because it is temporary, and a way of earning easy money while I study. My greater fear is that, upon graduating, I will find myself with a permanent job that is equally boring. That prospect has inspired terror ever since I came back from Canberra.
It sounds ridiculous, but it is making me truly sick with dread just thinking of this right now. I need to go to a careers counsellor, I think. I need to feel that there is a job out there that won’t include hours of boredom in its description. I need to have my mind stimulated. Right now, I feel as though it is dribbling from my ears. I have become a mindless automaton; a tortured human mind trapped in the body of an assembly-line robot.
I may have written many a stirring ode to public health, and it is true that my passion for it runs deep, but the only public health career I am certain I could get is also the least appealing to me. I do not want to be a public servant. My father’s side is rife with them, and they’re not exactly the sorts of people I want to emulate. I do not want to be tied down to an office or waylaid by bureaucracy, and yet at the same time, I don’t feel I am brave enough to work for anything so adventurous as AusAid or the various overseas aid agencies. It took a great deal of strength to deal with going interstate for six weeks by myself. Heading to a developing country for indefinite periods of time would no doubt be a one-way trip to nervous breakdown land. I hardly think I have the ‘stuff’ for it at this point in my life.
Where exactly does this leave me? Gripped by horror; trembling with fear; sick with dread…all the usual terms of endearment for my favourite buddy: anxiety. I cannot do this anymore. I cannot worry without end about things that may not even transpire. My brother - the marijuana-smoking, lava lamp owning, hard-rock loving current version of my brother – tells me to ‘chill out’. Perhaps he has a point. Perhaps I worry needlessly, because it is in my nature, my wiring, my chemistry. Perhaps I should ‘go with the flow’, if I could ever convince my brain to stand down. Perhaps I am creating boredom where only the everyday resides. Perhaps I should just accept that boredom happens, like anything else.
Is boredom just a natural part of working life? Should I accept that death-ray of ennui with grace? Or have I lumbered down the wrong path, one along which my ever-hungry mind will simply starve to death? I do not have the answers right now. All I have are desperate questions. I need to know more about where I am heading. I need to know all the exits and all the escape routes. Most importantly, I need to know that I’m not travelling along a no-through road.
