M. is out of the house. I have my computer on my lap. I have ideas in my head. But, there’s always the internet to detain me from actually creation. I wonder why I hate myself?

I went to a rare work-related social thing last night. Actually, I assume it’s rare, but in truth for all I know there are parties left and right and I’m just not invited. Probably that’s the case. I mean, I wouldn’t invite me. Although to my credit, I tend not to come empty-handed. My single, uncoupled self would bring booze. But, paradigm shift and other pretentious phrases happen in a relationship, so we brought a log.

A French log, actually. A non-Noelle buche, I suppose. No champignons anyway.

Tasty.

I went to this particular thing, because the guest of honor represented exactly what I have learned irked me about my Cambridge life. They say in NYC and LA everyone is on their way to being something else. Waiters, office workers, cab drivers with scripts and books and aspirations. I’m thinking the world might be full of such like people, not just Lala land and the apple city, but if Boston is, it sure ain’t happy about it. Most jobs in Boston, even when I was at my careerist career-focusing, I was a fucking square peg aching to be hammered into place. (Well, I wasn’t fucking aching, but someone else sure wanted to give me the beatdown.)

It always felt, back in my other life, that you had to be one thing or another, but anything short of singular thinking was fucked up and wrong-minded. Comedy clubs felt that way, too. Various levels of folks would opine on who’s legit and who’s not, the artists and the pikers, and build up their fragile ego selves with the parsing some indecipherable calculus of who is real or genuine. And, forget about the office jobs, where all outside interests were subterranean. I remember a chick working as the fucking petty-cash cashier in accounting at one job WHISPERING about her nightlife and her soca band.

One of M.’s Cantabridgian friends wants an interesting job, so’s she’ll have something to say if she’s dinner or cocktail partying.

Here, though, people spend a disproportionate amount of time separating themselves from being the sum total of their 9-5. Even the folks in charge, who clearly have invested a little bit of something to get the kind of titles on their name plaques that reek authority, have other things going on. Music, wilderness treks, gorilla-peeping, sports fantasy camps, working out, reality-show addictions, whatever, it ain’t all work. There’s a fair amount of beer and skittles.

I should step back a bit and revisit my saying there’s none of those outside interest things in Boston. I seem to remember some kind of executive killing himself in his personal plane, so he had to give a shit enough about something to get a pilot’s license.

The point is, here, with my fantasies about someday writing legitimately (or at least mailing off a proposal and getting my ass rejected, repeatedly), ain’t no thang. I’m a face in the goddamn crowd. The honoree, who’s left our little mom and pop shop, is staying home with his keyboard to honor the contract a publisher with which a publisher hooked him up and expects something from the advance. Fucking A, he’s doing it, and sadly, I’m just happy to have been in his circle for a bit to remind myself it’s possible.

In fact, I either gotta get back to performing or find a writers’ group to keep the memory of not being alone alive.

The other thing about Boston is, I should just hate this guy on principle for having a book deal. He’s many things I am not, young and bright coming first to mind. So, in the art and science of chip-on-your-shoulder begrudgery, I really should wish him failure and misery. But, he’s a good guy, and I simply don’t.

Maybe I am just a sunshine, positive spirit who needed some actual Californian sunshine to bust out. I wish him well and will buy his book, because I knew him. (Actually, that and because it’s about doctors and the medical education system, and given my purgatory at my last job, the medical complex is something too familiar.) I miss my angry self a little, though.

Now, if only I could get over my fucking block about my fucking horrible book idea and focus, I really could feel the warm rays of happiness. Not likely, but I dream.

The only downside to all of this nice, swell, outside lives side of the people I know now, is there are quite a few more people who have read ‘blogs or ‘blogged themselves. Yikes. I never will quite live down my reasonable fear of the so-called blogosphere and the impossibility of neatly compartmentalizing my life.

So, as we left the shindig and the honoree mentioned that his way to procrastinate writing was finding and reading weblogs instead. If that was a veiled reference, all’s I can say is this ain’t me.

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