Daniel's Guest Blog

So I applied to this graduate school and I found out yesterday that I got in. Aside from that whole prospect of exploration in a collegiate environment stuff, what's most exciting about this is that I get to leave my totally soul crushing job that I've really just been keeping due its somewhat fancy reputation and personal lethargy.

But now that I get to leave the Deathstar the place has become much more amusing. This morning, as I was walking to work at 11 [I had a hangover (see below). I went to work when it went away.], I saw one of my most hated coworkers having a cigarette in front of the building. He greeted me and shared some pointless anecdote about the office that I'd missed "due to my tardiness" (he actually used that phrase, the loser). As we entered the building, he got on the elevator first and held the door for me. "No thanks," I said."Because I smell like cigarette?" he asked. I thought about this for asecond. "No," I said. "I just don't want to talk to you any more."

Crucial to the success of this plan is not telling anyone about gradschool. I want them just to notice steadily weirder and weirder behavior and have them wonder if I'm taking drugs at work or have Asperger's syndrome or something. And then, just when they're starting to have meetings where they want to discuss my declining productivity I'll just be like "oh, yea, grad school."

That thing at the elevator somewhat satisfying, but I'm contemplating taking this to another level. Could they actually fire me? It's always been my contention, since I have the world's most lazy and incompetent administrative assistant (she also has a weak chin that's deeply annoying to me, but I guess that's not relevant), that that sort of thing just doesn't happen here. But it looks like it's time saying "Yea, I don't really care" to people in my office when they ask me to do stuff. I've also been having fantasies about saying "well, I might get to that by the end of the day, but realistically I 've got 4 IM conversations going on here and they're pretty intense. Also, I haven't checked out OverheardinNewYork yet this week and I totally need to call my little brother, I haven't talked to him in a couple weeks so it'll take awhile. How about if this becomes one of those projects where you just send me emails about it every couple weeks until finally you give up and assign it to that intern who doesn't write very well?" It takes at minimum 4 months to fire someone from a nonprofit; the graduate program starts in August.

Realistically I'm having a little trouble implementing this plan.This morning I had to get something done by noon and I found myself telling my boss that I'd fix the edits really quickly. Then I realized that was old-style thinking. Also, I hadn't signed on to gmail by 1pm and one of my friends sent me an email with "where are you dickhead?" in the subject line. Good point: where was I? Off doing work when I could have been goofing off. Working diligently under deadlines was what nervous-young-professional-Dan would do. I am now scholar-Dan and I need to reevaluate my priorities. So who wants to take of early and get drunk with me at 3?