p.s. what do I like about it?

As a follow-up from the last post… Even a number of my friends would think of an administrative post as a soul-sucking wasteland. Why do I like it, then?

*I despise “beautiful soulism,” and also despise the haughtiness of gripers who do nothing to improve a situation and use their gripes only to establish false moral superiority over anything that’s actually happening. In short, I like to take responsibility for things whenever possible.

*I like the challenge of juggling 7 balls at once. On a good day you can catch 3 or 4 of them while preventing the others from hitting the floor.

*It’s very satisfying to know that any specific thing you do on a given day can lead to a permanent institutional improvement if you do it right.

*When people drop by your office with a problem, either you can solve their problem, or at least tell them honestly that there’s nothing that can be done about it.

*In this sort of position you start having access to real information, and are no longer left adrift in paranoid and groundless fantasies about the amorphous workings of something called “power”, of which one is supposedly deprived oneself.

I’ve said before that the best thing about having a Ph.D. is that you no longer have to take Ph.D.’s too seriously. By the same token, the best thing about having “power” is that you no longer have to take power that seriously. That’s probably true of many things. There are plenty of things in life that seem like pure evil or the pure key to all fulfillment until you actually have them. And once you do, you see that they’re as finite and problematic as anything else. Almost anything becomes more interesting at that point.