Maybe it's just a different type of joy, but whenever I sit down to leaf through some academic journals to see what kind of thinking is going on in the ivory towers these days, I always get depressed. Why does academia always seem so joyless? Why is academic writing so dry, why does it constantly focus on the tearing-down rather than the building-up? Why is so much of the work coming from creative writing programs so bleak? Why are the papers coming out of comparative literature and English literature programs so mind-numbingly dull? Where's the happiness, the joie de vivre, the signs of people enjoying themselves?

Sigh. Maybe I should just aim to earn an honorary doctorate from somewhere, somehow, someday.