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•24 December, 2002•
To sound Gen X and angsty, I’ve been fumbling through my life again with no desire to do much, except watch it pass me by. It doesn’t mean that I’ve given up or that I’ve decided that none of it is worth a n y t h i n g , it’s just one of those weeks (or two weeks) where before I know it, it’s 11:45 PM and all I can remember of the day was achieving nothing worth mentioning at all.
The thing is, I’m not really too upset by this, except for the simple fact that I have far too many things to do, and insufficient motivation to get them done. Most distressingly, when I go back to work tomorrow, everyone will realize that the only thing I’ve managed to make any headway in at all is in carrot cake consumption. Oh, never mind the fact that the rest of my life away from this desk is dismally boring. But really, I’m just being melodramatic.
If I was to summarize it down into a me kind of way, I could list my achievements of the last week in a form similar to ``Oh, I bought one of those new ionized hairdryers, and I also got a new pair of shoes, dangerously high stillettos made to look like sneakers.``
I’ve also concluded that I don’t want to be an accountant, a lawyer, a teacher or a professional bass fisherman. Although I am certain that I probably already knew this.
This is my real problem. I’m highly materialistic (and to think I only discovered that this year). I know the hip thing is to want to eat beans and complain about the injustice in the world as it doesn’t allow you to buy all the drugs you want, enough food to survive and save enough to go to Europe in the summer. But the awful stark truth about me is that I like money. I like being able to see something I want and being able to buy it without having to scrimp and save, all the while whining about it. I like having new shoes. I like buying new movies. I like being able to buy presents for people I love that will make them s m i l e. I want to have a house one day, with clean lines and fancy, square, large, minimalistic, glossy books on my coffee table. I want to see the world.
All of these things involve money.
However, I know the importance of the ideal that money truly isn’t everything. In which lies my oft-repeated problem of ``What am I going to do with my life ?`` Because I don’t want to be stuck in a job which bores me to death. I want to be in a position with my life where everything is going swimmingly. Where the bills get paid, but I enjoy what I do in order to pay them. I can’t say I want to be in a `creative` job, because I’m not creative in the sense that I can get a bunch of lines and curves together and make them s i n g to people. I can’t write stories with words that twist people into awkward smiles of recognition.
The type of person that I am wants to be the best possible person at the things I set out to achieve. I’m one of these terribly annoying people when I know what I want done, because I want it done perfectly, as if any imperfection would betray my imperfect soul. The problem arises when you don’t really have any concrete future achievements that have made themselves apparent to you yet. It’s hard to find your focus. It’s hard to figure out how to get through the ever-present miasma and land amongst my ``happy, successful future life`` that I seem to so desperately want.