Hey, so it's been a while

As demonstrated by the above figure, I haven't been keeping up with this whole blogging thing lately. Someone mentioned in a comment recently that my lack of posting has brought into question my intelligence. I'd like to think that the two are disconnected enough that I don't have to quit my job and start selling ice cream or something because my engineering skills have diminished so far that I can't even remember how to calculate headloss through a pipe just because I haven't posted crap on the internet in a few months.

In all seriousness (or at least in a little more seriousness), I'd like to also think that my presence in the blogosphere hasn't disintegrated. Those of you with blogs that I follow know that I'm a regular commenter, as much as I can at least. Hopefully some of my comments have been mildly intelligent.

So enough about proving my intelligence.

I've discovered recently that I'm a major procrastinator. Okay, okay, so I haven't discovered this really, I've known all along. But with schoolwork it was always different. If I left stuff until the last minute, I would just bear down and work for like 24 hours straight until it got done. But now I am actually at a desk in some semblance of regularity, which forces me into work mode 7.5 hours a day (at least). Which means that I'm forced into non-work mode the remaining hours of the day. This is great on one hand, because it means that I'm free to do what I want with that non-work time. But it also means that I actually have to work for the those 7.5 hours a day. It is actually really hard for me to do that. Especially when the work I'm doing is boring.

Which brings me to this whole topic of boring work, which I'd like to break down into two main questions:

1. Should I really expect my career to be "fulfilling" and "rewarding" (and therefore not "boring"), or is it just reality to say that "work is work" and I should just get on with making money?

2. How much of what I define as boring is really just my perception of the work?

My own random comments regarding these questions:

I'd like to think that all my education hasn't been for nothing. If work is just "work" than why didn't I stick to fixing vacuum cleaners or finish carpentry?

I am realizing that I may be among a generation of people that are stuck with this "burden" of living up to our parents' expectations that the world is at our fingertips and our potential to find satisfying careers is limited only by our imagination and dreams. Holy crap. That's some kind of life to live up to.

I do find myself in a place of lack of motivation sometimes (as in motivation to get up in the morning, motivation to actually work while I'm at work, etc). But I realize that in most cases it is a matter of motivating myself first, and then once I get going on a task, I find myself more apt to continue to be motivated. Hence the perception question - work may seem more boring from the outside, but if you are a self-motivated person, you won't find that work boring once you are doing it. Problem is, I'm not a self-motivated person.

Let me know what you think. If you're still out there...