So I decided to take a break from my grading during my lunch hour so that I could give my hand a rest. I’ve gone through about 50 papers with about 75 or so left to do, so I figure I’m due a break being about over a third of the way through. I grabbed an article for my thesis and began reading. It’s a twenty page article about the French suffix -aille, discussing its use and morphology and morphophonology and some of its semantics. I’m halfway through it right now, and as I was reading about the relative consonant frequency of the coda preceding the suffix, I realized something.

I was getting pretty into the article at this point, thinking of further studies I could do in the future after I’ve written my thesis so I can continue my work on these suffixes, and I realized that I’m boring. Worse than that, not only am I boring, but I’m very esoterically so! One of my webcomics was joking about a character who had majored in 16th century Anglo-Saxon end table doilies, pretty much mocking how absurdly specialized some people get in their fields. Well, I think I’m about two steps away from that. Really, I’m probably already a foot in the grave on this one. I mean, I’m freakin’ writing an at-least 75-page thesis on French pejorative suffixes, and I’m already thinking up ways that I can expand this study in the future so that I can get into it even more in-depth. What more depth is there?! This is already the minutiae of the miniscule of the finely detailed. What’s worse: damn near no one cares.

I think that it was at this point that I realized how fucking boring I am. I mean, most people can have normal conversations about sports or the news or TV or something like that, but I don’t care about any of those things. They’re uninteresting or unrelated to me or just too vague for me to grasp. It’s a weird feeling to be able to say that the news, something that most people care very deeply about and even get up in arms over, strikes me as vague and nebulous and unknowable. Whereas French suffixation and morphology makes so much sense, eh? I’m fucking boring, even Boring with a capital b. I can’t carry on the simplist of conversations, yet I can prattle on about strange allomorphs and the etymology of a suffix through Old Germanic to Old French to modern English. How @#$%ing interesting is that?!

I told my students in class recently that most of their professors are not there to entertain them, that most of them got to where they are today in academia because they were bookish and studied a lot and became experts in their fields. This background may make them shy, nerdy or even just plain backwards, and now that I look at my desk littered with French dictionaries and articles and notes, I’m beginning to think that I’m already nerdy and backwards enough, do I really want to make myself worse?

I guess I do, since I plan on continuing this esoteric and erudite education until I get my happy initials Dr. EAD. I suppose that what this means is that my friends and family will simply have to put up with more quirkiness and senility than they already do. I mean, I was always weird, but now I’m borderline boring-to-death. Can things get any worse than being boring?