Another of those twenty-something angst-filled entries...
I've been working for ten months and 6 days now, and today marks the very first day I actually felt excited about work. Obviously not the same kind of excitement one feels on a rollercoaster, catching the eyes of that cute guy in the corner of a bar, or even finding a fabulous pair of heels on sale in your size (a joy never to be discounted), but nevertheless, I didn't sit in my maroon-and-pink tinted cube today with the general background murmur of "Woe is me, why am I here? Someone please wake me up."
This is a breakthrough!
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Still, I daily plot my escape. I bought my ticket home yesterday for my July 4th weekend and contemplated not ever coming back--this has apparently happened at my company by the way, they sent two of their employees from NJ to CA on a business trip and they simply never returned--but then I realized that I don't even like S. California. Especially not where my parents are. Still, anywhere but here...
I was counting the cities I can actually live in and not have to drive. I'm down to San Francisco, Boston, and of course, New York City. Is that really it? The list seems pathetically short to me. I'm coastal, by the way; I don't do the Great Breadbasket thing.
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My car's dying, too. It's a 10-year old family car, the car my mother and I both learned to drive in in our first years in the US. The benevolent relocations specialist at my Company shipped the car all the way out from its 9 years of garaged existence in sunny Southern California to what is said to be the coldest winter in NJ in 20-some years. Now the transmission needs replacing, which will probably cost roughly the same amount as the standard market value of my car.
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My Company was having a book sale for charity today in the atrium. All paperback novels one dollar each. The Romance section took over half of the table space. Browsing between and around these to find something readable--I'm incapable of passing through a book sale like these without buying at least a dozen--I was struck not only by the sheer volume of these intolerably cheesy Romance titles, but by how well-thumbed and worn they were. Some of them looked practically translucent. Someone told me once how women (I'm picturing a middle-aged woman here, disgruntled with her own sexless, romanceless marriage...) use romance novels as men use their favorite issues of Playboy. So to even touch one of these used copies of Romance novels is out of the question for me. Then it occurred to me that these books have all been donated by employees of the Company.
This is why I need to get out. No shame in escapist literature, but I don't want to remain in a place where its women find flipping through a romance novel a pleasurable evening option after their day at the office.
This is not The Life.
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Some of my picks:
*Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: I love unlikely tales...the petite Chinese man who wrote this little book went to France when he was 30 to "re-educate" himself. He's a filmmaker and this is his first novel, written in French. He was 45 when it was published. Charmed...utterly charmed.
*The Poem of Cid: giving Spanish lit another chance...
*Catch-22: Yes, I read it, yes, I own it, but my copy's in California, and this was a nice, oversized, glossy copy. Obviously never read by its owner.
And nine more, but I'm tired of writing...