So Howzit Going?

I am miserable, tired and cranky. Taking two courses is apparently much more effort than taking one (even if that one is MGT 650.) I miss having people around. I miss having breakfast at Sugar Mags and walking the dogs on good harbor beach afterwards. If I am not too busy to see people then I am too tired and bitchy to see people. This of course is a feedback loop and it makes me even crankier.

Work in my company is always busy this time of year (there’s lots to be done for clients before year end and there are budgets to be made and strategic planning to do) and I’ve felt like I don’t have the energy for it.

Tonight in Accounting class as I struggled to stay awake a thought occurred to me. “I don’t want to be an MBA candidate anymore.” All right, Cantabridgienne, I thought to myself, what would you prefer to be instead?

Clearly the first, obvious, answer was a kept woman. Since we’re daydreaming (although given that I was falling asleep I was close to “night dreaming") I imagined myself blearily kissing my theoretical keeper as he headed off the rat race (and an equally theoretical corgi jumped up into the warm spot on the bed) before going back to sleep until ten and then rising to walk on the beach with the (theoretical) dog before eating things covered in hollandaise sauce for breakfast. What could be better than that?

Certain problems with this plan occurred to me. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but we’re experiencing a severe dearth of Sugar Daddies on the North Shore right now. Also, this theoretical Sugar Daddy would probably expect that I would provide certain services for which I have no aptitude and in which I have no interest. He might want me provide weird sexual favors or he might want me to clean and wear high heels and makeup (ew). Worse, he might want children (shudder). But more to the point, even if there was some wonderful millionaire who was happy to keep me as a trophy wife in spite of my disinterest in things like cleaning or decorating I have no interest in being a lap dog. It’s not that I have a problem with providing devotion or saying “How was your day dear?” It’s just that I don’t want to be in a situation where no one ever asks me “and how was your day dear?” No one ever asks the dog that. And while it would be nice to be fed and cared for, I feel like if I was (even under the most ideal circumstances) I’d be a pet. I don’t want to be a pet. I’m way to fond of my independence. So clearly I cannot be a kept woman.

The next alternative that occurred to me is that I could go back to Bunker Hill finish my Database Management Certificate, get Oracle certification and go be a DBA (that’s Database Administrator-not Doing Business As) somewhere. I could sit in a back office and never have to talk to another human being again during business hours. This plan has a certain appeal. For one thing it’s more easily done. (In fact this *was* my plan before I ditched it to go to business school). For another I’d never have to do another group project again. I’d never have to edit a group paper again! I’d much rather do SQL problem sets than Accounting problem sets. I’d never have to take any course that scared me. This is a failure point.

If I did this I’d be choosing my career path based on my weaknesses (avoiding dealing with people because they either scare or bore me) and I feel that this would be a bad idea. For one thing, I’m pretty sure employers would prefer to hire a 22 year old kid over me (because I’d be more expensive than a 22 year old.) For another it would get old quickly. I am not knocking DBAs but deciding to become one because you hate people (as opposed to because you like building databases and mining data) is a bad idea.

So apparently I’m stuck being an MBA candidate-even though dealing with other people scares me and this is a degree in Dealing With People. Even though I’ll have to take more classes in Accounting and I’ll have to take classes in Finance (the horror!) Even though I am not getting what I want out of my Project Management class and Accounting hurts my head and the thought of taking the rest of the classes I have to get through scares me.

Because it scares me it is the right thing to do. Or rather, because of the way it scares me it is the right thing to do. With a few possible exceptions (Statistics, Finance) these things don’t scare me because I’m not smart enough to do them-they scare me because they will be a pain in the ass to deal with. There will be Difficult teammates and schedules to juggle and there will be concepts I don’t get because I didn’t spend enough time with the text book. There will be ineffective professors and not enough sleep. But the thing is that none of this is stuff I can’t do. So I’ll keep at it.