Act 2 in which our heroine determines she will devise a getaway plan...

Scene: Our heroine, "Leese", bespectacled, overweight, and nerdishly dressed sits at her computer typing, pretending to work but actually planning sweeping changes in her life. Papers, books, and computer equipment are strewn about her workspace in a way that communicates to her co-workers that she is rather busy and does not want to be disturbed.

"Hmmm, I think I can take some time off after the sale of the house. If we downsize to a smaller place,I can do it", she murmurs under her breath. "I'll continue my health coverage in a Cobra until I can get onto C's next year. And I'll begin expanding my column bit by bit until I have enough markets to stop drawing on my savings."

"Savings? Damn...I forgot to do that. OK well, I can work part time at Megabucks Industries until I've got enough to leave there all together."

Leese calls up an excel spreadsheet and proceeds to work out what her monthly budget will be once they are able to quit their ridculously bloated mortgage. There is the potential to save over 1000 dollars a month.

"Think what I could do without a one thousand dollar a month obligation?" She stands up from her computer and does a little jig in her cube. A co-worker walks by and asks if she is ok. Apparently the jig slightly resembles convulsions.

"No....I'm fine!" Leese says sheepishly. "Just a cramp in my foot".

She sits down again and closes down her budget. "Next I have to start making lists of things to give away...".

End Scene

The road not taken

I'm at a cross roads or perhaps I've always been at these choice points. I have a decision to make...yet I've always had them to make. I see, with all the amazing clarity one has right before waking from a dream, "what I am supposed to do with this life" but...that change, that prospect of pursuing my little pet dream is alarming. Pursuing that dream means letting go of others.

This doesn't mean that I am at this moment a perfectly good writer, one sans the usual character flaws and nagging neurosis. A writer without the the twin states doubt and despair, a writer who's got a trust fund fist full of money stashed in her banks' back pocket. No. I am not not that writer. Instead I am a mid-career civil servant who is predicably bored and mediocre at her job. I own a small home on an immoderate parcel in a vulnerable inner-city suburb. I am also a woman of a certain age whose grown tired of hiding an obsession for a profession I have not dared openly acknowledge. I know, as sure as I canceled my women's writer's workshop because I hadn't made room in my life in it yet; as sure as I have been underworking at my day job for the last year and a half (or more); as sure as I will certainly do no work at all today related to my job description until most of the day has passed, I know, I know if I do not commit my life to writing in some full measure soon, I shall re-commit my life to being a "safe" second-rate, slack and flaccid functionary within the bowls of a bureaucracy.