And besides, I enjoy my work. I like playing with a data set until 11pm while listening to baroque or hardcore industrial. I like spending all day at the lab processing blood or recording behavior or engaging subjects in tests. I like feeling productive.

I am utterly conditioned from years of mental discipline to work long, long hours with little discomfort (and many occasional breaks; I'm not a robot). But beyond some professional chores and tidying up, I have nothing to do. I am immensely excited that I actually have baselines to do tomorrow. It gives me a reason to actually go into the lab, instead of showing up just because it's expected (or maybe not even expected).

I am not good with large amounts of free time. It either has no emotional charge to it or I feel guilty. True, I feel guilty about almost all of the actions I take in this or that case for this or that reason, but lack of work feels so...dishonorable.

All too soon there will be cleaning, moving, adjusting, and then another semester. This will be the year of neuroscience courses. In the place of being a Teaching Assistant it may not be bad. And truth be told, grades are now utterly irrelevant. I have funding until my 6th year of grad school, more than enough to finish. And I have never heard of a professor looking at grade transcripts to see whether they want to take you on as a post-doctoral researcher.

Not that that'll stop me from showing up others in the class. I find the lack of discussion in discussion sections appauling. I'm more than happy to metaphysically slap them for their laziness. At our level it is inexcusable. Then again, as grad students, I think we should be training like Zen monks. The intensity of developing iron bodies would be only as painful as the inability to achieve emptymind. And emptymind is a beauty beyond scope. It is almost as wonderful as love, and not nearly as neurotic.

But that is me. Varying degrees of dissatisfied between many punctuated moments of joy. The only thing that remotely sets me apart from the tens of millions of other fragile neurotics is a complete lack of moral superiority and self-honesty. I know myself because I am always, always thinking about myself. I dwell on the negative and indulge in misery because I enjoy it. It brings me comfort. It builds character. And I claim no high-standing morality.

Quite the exact opposite. What I pass off as moral understanding or sympathy is largely an intellectual product. I trick myself into thinking I feel a certain way, and suddenly I do.

Human life is one of the most abundant resources on the planet. It is both precious and often utterly wasted. We should be ashamed that we squander it: in war, in over-intellectual non-debates like stem cell research, in euthanasia, in eugenics. We have traded honest exploitation for a caste system of indirect slavery. Walmart carries 'peasant's insurance' for their employees, collecting when they are dead. And there are a myriad of conditions and situations where the person in question should have been food for the wolves...but now only drain our resources.

Suck weakness sickens me. Such people sicken me. I feign pleasant timidity or bold assertiveness for cultural convention sake. Most take my rigidity as a sign to be teasing. But the alternative is not so simple, where really you just conform to non-conformist attitudes.

And it's continually frustrating when I've typed several paragraphs and realize that, if but for better diction and grammar, I sound like every other bitching neurotic.

But wait a tick. This is the b-side.

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