In need of an attitude adjustment

This is a little more realistic.

I blame my parents and Sesame Street. My whole childhood I was told "You can be anything you want to be!" This statement was kind of true, in that my sights were set pretty low (English teacher? pretty much in the grasp of most literate people), but also was untrue, because "get paid to do nothing but read awesome books of your choosing and then hang out with reasonable people and talk about them" isn't actually a job that exists.

The last few weeks I've been fighting a sort of job-related malaise. Actually, I've been fighting job-related malaise for a lot longer than that, but I've been thinking about it a lot for the last few weeks. I guess it boils down to the fact that, although I'm using my degree and editing and stuff, my job has nothing to do with my interests. I occasionally get to be passionate about punctuation, but the vast majority of my day is spent on stuff that just doesn't blow my skirt up.

I think my generation has this idea that we all deserve jobs that make us happy. I feel like we expect to wake up and feel excited about going to work every morning. But in my experience, this is hardly ever the case. I don't hate my job, my boss isn't evil, I make decent money for what I do. I am working hard on being okay with having a job that isn't fun or wild or even particularly interesting, because there are hardly any other jobs out there that would even be this good a fit. Wish me luck on that shit.

Man, this post is a downer, huh? Do you have a job you love? How do you cope with a job you don't?

P.S. While it's probably true that most literate people could get certified to teach English, I feel obligated to point out that most people wouldn't have been as awesome a teacher as I was.