2002-03-06 - 11:33 p.m.
Grieve, choke, laugh, choose, pray, ask, LIVE ... and learn

Today was a dig in the fingernails and hold on for dear life kind of day. Don't ask why. It just was. It was the kind of day that starts out with jumpy nerves that don't calm down no matter how much caffeine I drink, and ends with me burying my mind in someone else's prose.

It's escapist. I know that. I also know that at this rate, my novels will never get written ... this Sunday, on my 24th birthday, I will officially have been writing Vanndia's story for half of my life, and Vladimir will have been part of nearly a third of my years. I'm just not cut out for the day job thing. 90% of my days are like this one, to some degree or another, and by the time I get home I've used up all the energy I had to deal with the day. What's left to be creative with?

It's one of those catch-22, shot my own damn self in the foot kind of scenarios. I will never be happy with a desk job. Desk jobs suck enough out of me that I can't cut it as a novelist in my spare time. But if I don't publish things, I'll never be able to afford to give up the desk job. Et cetera.

Seven weeks or so until I decide whether I have enough courage to go see a doctor and ask him for a label. I hate labels. Senseless things, bracketing you into a role whether you like it or not, at least to others' eyes. I'd rather that, though, than continue to go through life feeling as though my skin doesn't fit right and always being told that if I just tried harder, I could be happy with my job or have a boyfriend or have my novel done or pick up a $35/hr spare-time programming job ...

Bitter much? I did drink too much caffeine today, and I don't think I got enough sleep either. It makes me maudlin. But then, I've been chronicling my life here more than a year now, and I'm sure any constant readers I might have know the rest of the spiel by now, so I won't go into it. (Oh, and Argyle, I'd add my voice to those that say depression &etc. are not emotions to be envious of. I believe you can be perfectly deep without sinking into the muck to get there).

Woe, oh woe is me, who has a decent life and is sick of it anyway. That was sarcasm, in case someone couldn't tell. Perhaps I should be saying, Woe is me, who is sick of her life, and is disgusted with herself for being sick with her life? Nah, I think that sounds a little too pretentious.

Twenty-four. Good God. I walked into the used book store the other day and walked out with Louis L'Amour's entire Sackett book series, because I could. Nearly twenty short Westerns, with a very large grip on my memory. Dad owned them once, then sold them; on Monday, nostalgia wouldn't let me pass them by. When I told Dad, he smiled, and said he'd have to borrow them from me and read them again. It struck me then; he's turning 51 this year. His father's 77, his uncles older, and my mother comes from long-lived stock as well. I probably have more than half a century left ahead of me, barring stupidity, accident, or an act of God. What on earth am I going to do with all that time?

Guess I'll find out. Tune in tomorrow for the (hopefully less frazzled & depressed) further adventures of Shell, post-college girl still finding her feet.