Pity the Poor White-Collar Professional!

This has not been an easy week for yours truly. After a month of freedom I now have to buckle back into the straitjacket every day at Geeksoft Corp.

Oh yes, pity me and my overinflated salary, please! While people toil in the mines or on the factory floor for a pittance, I sit in my ergonomic chair and stare at my glare-free computer screen swilling free soft drinks for a fortune!

However, this is my blog so I will whine anyway. In the last month of quasi-unemployment, my work life actually took on a shape I liked. I rose at a reasonable hour. Commuted to the nearby coffee shop where I worked on things I cared about - like planning the class I'm teaching, writing articles, or applying for writing residencies.

Afternoons I spent working out and doing more work - my own work - at another coffee shop or perhaps the library. Living in the self-contained urban oasis of lower Queen Anne, I hardly ever got in my car on a typical day, which added hours to my life that are now being cruelly snatched back by the Corporation and its gridlocked highway.

Of course, my sweet view condo in the urban oasis of lower Queen Anne doesn't come free. There is a mortgage (2!) attached to it and thus I am not free to simply write articles, apply for grants, teach classes, live a peaceful car-free existence, etc etc.

Not yet anyway. I'm getting closer but not yet.

Meanwhile let's get just a little bit personal.

Now that I am in a uh, uh, (will not say the word happy, will not say it, because as soon as I say it everything will become unhappy), working relationship - one that is more real than any I've been in since Mr. Loser himself (of whom there has been no glimpse or peep since the book came out and maybe he really HAS been too ashamed to leave his house!) I dream constantly about being cheated on.

I MEAN HELLO HAVE I NOT WORKED THIS OUT OF MY SYSTEM BY WRITING A NOVEL ABOUT IT!?

I dream constantly that I put all my trust in someone only to have them tell me, suddenly, that they don't love me anymore, and oh, by the way, they're running off with their barista/ex-girlfriend/coworker/someone who is not you.

My current boyfriend is devoted as can be which might be part of the problem because Loser was too. And, naive little 30-something that I was, I trusted him! I never suspected he would do what he did! I got really, truly thrown for a loop and my whole world view was thrown out of whack.

Lo these past five years I've specialized in dating men who were dashing and unavailable. It was much easier. I could pine away, all daydreamy in CrushLand, knowing, deep down, that the damn thing would never go anywhere and that I would never truly get hurt. I had plenty of fun in CrushLand(as you know). But I think I've grown up a bit. I hope I've grown up a bit. I read old entries from Breakup Babe and cringe. Not because they aren't well-written, oh but they are, but because I was like a f*cking 13-year old with all that boy-chasing I was doing! (Only when I was 13 I was far too nerdy for any boys to like me so I was making up for lost time).

It's hard growing up. It's hard having a mortgage. It's hard knowing you could get dumped, that you're gonna die, that no matter how glum you might feel, there are people far worse off than you. That's why I like to write. It's an escape from all this stuff. You escape to your fictional world and it's almost like being a kid in your pretend fort again.

Which is why I must really start writing another novel soon. I feel it gestating. Ideas come and go and slip-slide around. One will be here soon, I know it.

Meanwile I've already written about three topics on this blog and made it far too long and it's broken all the rules I've told my poor blogging students about so GOODBYE.

r