Wednesday 16 March 2011

Great expectations

At what point does one stop to show promise, and start to be all one could ever be? The years have gone by, and from a very mature child I've managed to grow into a scandalously childish adult. Swings and roundabouts, as they say. I've got no complaints. But the IQ that was so impressive in a 16-year-old must be nearing a 100 now, because, frankly, I haven't done that much with all that promise.

I've been knitting, that's about it. Getting manicures and brazilian waxes. I've cooked a few decent dinners, ironed a pile of shirts and vacuumed the house once or twice. I've been a lady of leisure, a homemaker, an idler extraordinaire with a penchant for feeling entitled and misapplied. A 1950s' model housewife who only cleans up for show, and prefers to sit around sipping lattes and watching Hollywood-gritty TV series all day long (Dexter and Californication are my latest fads).

Seemingly overnight, I have become an airhead. I've never been bored in my life, never disorganised, never, not since I turned 15, unemployed. Suddenly, I'm all of those things. I could have tried harder to productively occupy myself, but once I've dropped my budding CRA career and defected to the States, I've lost the momentum. I sat down on the sofa and found myself plump out of promise, and with a writer's block to boot.

I did eventually send a draft of the introduction to my boss. She sent it back with a note: "Death by referencing?"

Touché. It was four pages long and included about 150 citations. It's 1.5 pages now and I've whittled the citations down to seven. But it did take time.

Sometimes, I wonder if I'm prolonging this exercise because it's the only ambitious thing still on my plate. Once that's done, knitting and waxing would stop being mere distractions. And sometimes, I'm deluding myself into thinking that I'm a troubled academic, and that Richard Feynman was talking about people like me when he said that the best way to destroy one is to give them all the time they need to research that one thing they're actually interested in... Because once they're let loose on a single challenge, there's no end to tangents. I didn't just write an intro to my research, I've established the entire history of the field.

Oops.

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