I had a dream the other night. I was working in a small start-up company along with a grade school friend and, for some reason, Josh Flanagan from iFanboy.com. Our boss told us that each of us was eligible for a new position as a writer; the job of writer paid $500,000 a year. He said that after careful consideration, he was giving the job to Josh Flanagan. He had heard I was a good writer, but he had no evidence of that since he’d never seen me write anything.

You don’t have to schedule an appointment with your therapist to figure that one out. Time to shake off those blues and get back to the keyboard.

Work has presented me with the most fascinating paradox lately: how can I be so stressed out about something I don’t care about? At all?

To paint you the most basic watercolor-by-numbers picture of my job that I can: imagine that you are a research scientist. In your lab, a merry little hamster runs and runs on a jolly little wheel. Look at him go! Your job is monitor the hamster and measure everything about his jog, for Science. How fast does Hammy run? How often does he have to stop for water? How much water does he drink? Does his little heart go pitter-pat? And so on. You write it all down, think about it, and report on what you think it all means. You’re doing the job because you’re an expert at figuring out what it all means. You’re a trained figurologist from the Institute of Thinkology. With the right wheel, you and Hammy could cure AIDS.

Now imagine that this simple, simple job never gets to the figuring stage anymore because you have to spend all day repairing the broken wheel, mending the broken latch on the rusty cage, reattaching electrodes, and chasing Hammy around the lab after yet another monkey-aided escape attempt. Recently, as Hammy was running, you actually watched the wheel break off its axis, roll through the cage door, and carry Hammy right out into the traffic outside. And all you could think was, “This time, maybe I just let him go. If Hammy ends up under a radial, maybe that’s what it takes.”

I mean, we can’t even figure out what the monkeys are doing here. Nobody remembers ordering them for anything.

Now imagine that your research, rather than curing HIV, was being applied to the prevention of, let’s say, dandruff. Lip chapping. Now you’re starting to get a feel for why, when I get invited to my third conference call of the day, I occasionally think, “Or, you know what I could do? I could go home to bed.”