The Irritating Necessity of Gainful Employment

• My job is boring, "yes, of course, so is mine" you say, and I understand. I am a Direct Marketing Associate. I thought Marketing would be a good fit for me, hoping that I would be able to put some of my acting and creative skills to good use and in some ways I have done. However, perhaps I am too efficient at the "office" portion of my job because I am forever sitting here at my desk wondering why I've been scheduled to be here for another hour. Some days in fact, I have absolutely nothing to be accomplished. Is this a defect of mine? Is there some task I have overlooked? So I make up things to do, I color-code my schedule with highlighters. Yellow for all the irritating times I must sit, mostly alone, in this silly little office. Eventually I get tired of attempting to come up with some semi-workish thing to do, and do other things, such as this blog. Now comes the irritating pang of guilt, the nervous look over my shoulder at every passing shadow or banging door, worried that my boss has come to deliver something and has finally caught me not doing something work related! I am such a meek, insecure person inside, despite the strong persona I try to show the world, that my stomach ties itself in knots, and my body quivers with the turn of the key in the door, and my heart continues to pound even after the intruder to my solitude is proved to be, not my boss, but my fellow employee who feels as I do. What to do?

• I spend my lunch hours scribbling furiously away at my novel, but with each passing day I discover the end is further from sight! My characters keep taking my plot and twisting it, their relationships become more complex and chapters I thought safely finished rear their heads and demand a rewrite! I've forgotten to describe this adequately, this relationship needs to be dramatized more and my characters are not very obediant. I want them to speak and their words will not come, I can not hear their voices! I have to finish this story, all hope rests on it and it's sequel. I think back to my past frustrations, waiting for the next in a series and I wonder in awe that it came as quickly as it did. My hope is that my first book, once finished will provide me with enough income that I can quit working full time and just focus on my writing. How much faster could I write, if I could give it even half of the time I'm working at this awful job?

• Ok, another complaint. I work for a chiropractic clinic, and the DC that I see showed me in my x-rays that I have an entire extra vertabrae in my lower back. An L6 to be exact, which was actually supposed to fuse to the other bones in my sacrum and be S1. This is apparently an inheritted trait as my paternal aunt also shares this phenomenon, although hers is not as fully segmented as mine. Mine actually has it's own disc and moves and everything causing my lower back to curve slightly more than the average person. This causes pain when I drive for long periods of time, or have to stand or walk a great deal, especially in heels; things that I have to do for this job. My chiropractor's solution, besides getting adjusted regularly, is to stop wearing heels. I don't think so. I waited my entire childhood for the privelege of wearing high heels, and then I spent a good deal of time learning to properly walk in them, which is something of an art by the way. I also happen to have a closet full of them, all with corresponding Dr. Scholl's inserts either permanently asfixed or interchangable amongst them. The high heel is a staple in any even semi-fashion concious woman's closet and I like to think I am slightly more than semi. Really, if I have to be a mutant with an extra anything, couldn't it have been something a little cooler, like the mutant X gene? I could do some cool accessorizing with a weather power, even wings would be an improvement, I'd be a natural for a Victoria's Secret model.