From the Department of Rhetoric

Every Thursday afternoon I have class after a full day of work. It's a comp lit class that meets twice a week. We read Kant last week and this week, Hegel's up-you get the general idea.

On Tuesday afternoons, this is all heady, exciting stuff to yours truly. I'm a total keener. I sit way up front and scooch so far forward that my butt hangs off the seat. But this was a Thursday. My eyes blurred, my notes degraded into gray swipes as I dozed off, and my pen veered off the page. Worse yet, I couldn't follow the logic of what Professor Robbins was saying.

It wasn't his fault. No one else was falling asleep. Besides, you'd think that after eight hours of summarizing legal documents, a little Kant would come as a treat. What the hell was wrong with me? Now, besides excusing my in-class impropriety, there's another reason why I mention Robbins' class. At one point, I came to and the professor was asking the class whether we, as budding theorists, thought we should be trained in rhetoric as well as logic (trained to persuade as well as to reason). We all sort of ignored his question, but then I read Friday's editorial demanding academic credit for internships. "Why shouldn't vocational training be part of a liberal arts degree?" was the gist of it.

But that was just it-I was being lobotomized by my job as an associate web editor. To spare myself the pain of admitting that I'd shifted a standard deviation or two NYU-ward, my brain slid into some primitive survival mode and decided to let me topple face-forward towards my notebook instead.

My job isn't even that bad. What really gets me are the long periods of inactivity, when I'm basically sitting around waiting for stories to come in. Three-quarters of my working life are spent this way-propped up behind two monitors clicking back and forth between some blog and the "my assignments" queue on the god-awful program we use.

Since it's important that I process my work the moment it comes in, I'm far too distracted to do anything involving sustained mental activity during this downtime. So I spend it in a semi-stupor, feeling the way I do after three slugs of bourbon and eight hours of channel surfing. Needless to say, my concentration turns to sludge.

Now why would you want to do this to yourself for no money? No matter what your recruiter says, all you're going to be doing at an internship is sitting around, pretending to be busy.

I hate internships. Ironically, now that I have six years of experience, I could have my pick of them. It's true. Before I swore off them for good, I did.Writing "Columbia" on my resume seemed to sway human resources toward the eclectic (as opposed to lunatic) interpretation of my resume. Finally, when I couldn't possibly use another half-busted contact, let alone substandard training in another cringe-worthy software package, they wouldn't stop calling. And every one of them was completely worthless.

Take my "prestigious" Time Asia editorial internship. This was during the summer of 2001, and I only got the job because my dad works there. Now if a summer in Hong Kong sounds appealing to you, think again. I was living on a houseboat during typhoon season, and the only way I could afford to eat was by running up my dad's tab at the yacht club on shore.

My big story, the one that was supposed to propel me into the journalism big leagues, went tits up when someone supposedly slipped the senior reporter assigned to me a Mickey. He turned up a week later in some sleazy hotel bar in Bangkok. Then when I moved to New York a couple of years later, I hit up my former editor for an informational interview, but all he could remember about me was-"ah yes, James, you had some spectacular moments of drunkenness as I recall." Ding. It was all for naught.

Judging from the number of Cure-themed screensavers and Masters of Journalism diplomas I saw plastered up in the other Time Asia interns' cubicles, I'm guessing their average age was around 30. These prematurely gray, paunchy folk considered Time Asia a second-tier internship. According to them, the real internships went to a monied, experienced elite who scooped up all the fab editorial assistant slots, or at least they would have had there been any. We never had a chance. But hey, at least I got to sit on an Aeron chair for a couple of months.