Today is my division’s annual summer barbecue. For a cynical intern, the company picnic poses a real dilemma: the realization that there will be no one in the office during lunch clashes with primal lust for free food. (And lo, my virtue is being tested by the cases of barbecue-bound Diet Coke in our office, ripe for the stealing.) My current plan is to go, snag food, and slink back into the office to read uninterrupted. But the real danger is that in the process of food-snaggage, I will run into someone with whom I will then be forced to make actual conversation, completely destroying the sanctity of my lunch break. Despite my ambivalence about going at all, I signed up for a veggie burger, fruitlessly hoping that in some small way I was destroying their carefully designed system: “I’m not even going to eat my thirty-cent Gardenburger! Take that, fuckers!” O, the depths to which I have sunk.

Although yesterday was actually fairly busy, today has returned to usual. So far, I have had and completed one (1) task. My job was to deliver a package to another building in our complex, which, through extraordinary skill, I managed to stretch out into an hour. I easily could have accomplished the same feat in half that time—interns have access to little electric golf carts so as to deliver things quickly, but as far as I’m concerned, time is not of the essence. I hoofed it, thereby killing an eighth of the day. If that isn’t commitment, I really don’t know what is.

I take no enjoyment in time-wasting stunts of that nature, but with so little actual work and an entire day to kill, I have to find ways to avoid gouging my eyes out with a plastic spork stolen from the break room. On an average day, I’ll probably have about three actual tasks (“action items,” for Bureaucratese speakers). These take, on average, half an hour each. Like Peter in Office Space, “on a typical day, I probably do about an hour and a half of actual work.” Yet there is little joy in shirking duties when there are no duties to shirk.

The total futility of my working existence was confirmed when my fellow intern and I recently realized that our (admittedly generous) pay doesn’t even come out of our office’s budget, so productivity is not an issue. It’s both comforting and depressing now that I realize that it honestly makes no difference to my supervisors whether I do a good job, a bad job, or no job at all.

Fuck it. I’m taking the Diet Coke.

At the suggestion of Cathy, I have decided to start blogging. This is an act of desparation, to be sure, but it's 10:19 a.m. and I have completely exhausted the supply of legitimate work to be done. Checking my e-mail roughly 30,000 times a minute has its perks, but I think blogging looks a little more like work to the casual observer. In the interest of full disclosure, I must now own up to a brief and ill-fated LiveJournal, which was preceded by an OpenDiary, the depths of whose misdirected adolescent angst cannot even be described. If you were unfortunate enough to experience either of the above, I apologize. I can't honestly say I've changed that much, but mercifully, I no longer channel my woes into verse. All things considered, I believe the cringe factor promises to be slightly lower this time around.

The basic gist of my problem is the following: I have a lot of energy. I like work. I'm eager to please. I'm a lot like how I imagine Al Gore might have been as a nineteen-year-old. I am currently stuck 40 hours a week in a summer job with nothing to do. I have no idea how I'm going to swing a good reference out of this experience. "Yes, Susie did a phenomenal job sitting in our office. Really stellar. She looked very decorative."

I pick up this entry again after having done an actual hour of real work (!). Filing award letters--it's a living. Also, just got back from an interesting talk on the recent solar eclipse over Turkey. It was interesting, but the best part was hearing the scientists say things like "Well, the ro-vibrations are clearly going to make your Si9 readings inaccurate." I mean, obviously.

One of my fellow interns has a handmade picture frame on her desk. It's one of those things you get as a birthday present from your best friend, filled with goofy photos, one of those tacky but theoretically meaningful knick-knacks that say "Friends!!!!!" at the top in pink glittery pen. (I have to admit, those things really give me the ass. Like, if you have a picture of someone on your desk, it's not as if you don't already know your relationship to them. I've never looked at a picture on my desk and wondered, "You know, who is that fucker?") Anyway, "Friends" is what it's supposed to say. What it really says, though, is "Frieds."