...And I, I Took the Path...

You know what my problem is?  I’m pent up.  

Get your minds out of the gutter, folks.  That’s not what I mean.

(though truth be told – that applies, too)

No, my creative energies are just sitting somewhere in the vicinity of my stomach with nowhere to go.  That’s what I blame for the heartburn I’ve had the past couple weeks or so.

What about the Great American Novel, you ask?  The Great American Novel is stuck in outlining limbo.  The previous structure didn’t work because I ended up with way, way too much narration in the form of flashbacks, which is annoying.  The new structure works better, but I’m just not very interested in it.  And yes, in this particular case, I have to outline, or I’m going to end up writing a book as long as an unabridged dictionary.

Add to that the fact that I haven’t been given anything even remotely interesting or creative to do at work lately.  I love the people I work with, and I love my job in theory, but in practice I’m not too crazy about it lately.  Sometimes I feel like I’m talking to the wall when I’m talking to my boss.  I know she is crazy busy right now, and I know she is stressed, etc.  But it would be nice to know that she acknowledges my existence when I speak.

Sometimes I just want to give up on everything.  I want to chuck it all and learn to drive the big rigs.  I’d be wasting my $70,000 education, you say?  Bah, who cares?  I’m not exactly using it now.  I’m the only person in this department with the ability to write well and effectively.  Do they take advantage of that skill?  No.  And it grates on me when I have to put together a presentation binder with an executive summary that isn’t perfect.  Oh, the people who will be seeing it probably wouldn’t know that it isn’t perfect.  When I told my boss once that she lacked parallel structure in something she wrote, she said, “What’s that?”  I told her once that she had pronouns that lacked antecedents.  She didn’t know what that meant either, and she didn’t make the correction.  And the big boss, in doing a presentation in which she was talking about a saturation marketing campaign wrote on a slide that it was a “Gorilla” marketing campaign instead of a “Guerilla” marketing campaign.  I think I was the only one who realized the mistake, and it drove me crazy.

What is the point of all this?  I’m not sure.  I dreamed the other night that my toes were falling off.  When I looked up the symbolism of missing toes on a dream site on the ‘net, it said that it meant that I was following the wrong path.  In fact, several sites said that.

If I’m following the wrong path, doesn’t that mean that somewhere there is a right one?  Why isn’t it marked?  

I feel like I’m wandering around looking for giants’ thumbs.  And if you don’t know what that means, ask and I’ll share.  At least I’ll get to tell a story.