It's a shame when the real world interferes with how you'd really like to be living your life.

Mornings spent on a slow-moving train with your feet pulled out of their pinching high heels. Drops of coffee stained down the side of a cardboard cup of coffee that is slowly losing its structural integrity. The baggy under eyes of commuters who would much rather be in their beds, only they long ago forgot the reason they got up in the morning.

These are the mornings I wish I didn't have.

But if I didn't have them, I bet I would miss them.

When you look at your schedule for the day ahead and see that it holds no less than 5 meetings and a trip to the therapist, you wonder at what point you veered off the anthropology boho and onto the sidewalk of the bourgeois. Or maybe the anthropology boho was really a stone's throw away from the shrink anyway. Regardless, when you spent your college years romancing with quirky chaps and showing up to class in a pair of men's boxers, you probably never saw that you would be dressed up in a wool skirt that itches your ass, exposed as it is in the new black lace knickers that make you look fantastic (but which you will never reveal is part of the Sainsbury's Tu range and, far from the Agent Provacateur range, cost you £5 for 3 and you love them so much you're going to go back and buy more).

You also never knew the run-on sentence would become an art form you'd worship, but then life is full of surprises.

When the better part of your daytime is shaping up to be fresh squeezed orange juice and listening to Tegan and Sara's Where Does the Good Go over and over again, you may have reached a new level you never thought you'd reach. It's either a level where you can try to get to love the little things for the tiny enhancements that they are, or else it's perhaps a little game I like to think of as Lowering the Bar. You're not going to save the world delivering babies or write the next bestseller, but goddammit at least you're going to live your life pumped full of vitamin C.

I am not an author who has a home by the water and spends the mornings walking our dog before settling in front of my blinking PC and churning forth literature from my head while Angus builds a loft extension on our luxurious period property home. As much as I'd like to write the bestseller, it's never going to happen if A) I don't sit my ass down in front of a PC and write it, B) Have folks who will buy it and C) Get over my fear of rejection to try to do it. So my mornings of wilting coffee cups and shouting phone conferences are going to continue to reign supreme.

I am not a doctor decked in my scrubs, looking at a patient's chart and telling them that their outlook is good. I will not tread in sneakers that squeak down the hallway as I run through my morning's procedures in my head. I will not wear a pager that tugs down the top of my scrub pants and I will not have a wild flirtatious relationship with a doctor like Patrick Dempsey's on Grey's Anatomy, one remarkably without an ego problem and with a shock of hair I'd love to sink my fingers in while biting his earlobes.

I guess it comes down to a robust acceptance that what you do is not going to change. I am a project manager. I will project manage. Much as I hope and dream, I will not have the luxury of telling my boss to fuck off and quit my job, not just burning bridges but urinating on the smoking ashes of my burnt bridges. My ideal life is somewhere in between wandering the world as a nomad and the idea of getting paid to doing what I love. If I look around, not a lot of people have their ideal life-who dreamt as a child of being a project manager, receptionist, dog groomer or high school principle?

So here I am. Putting my feet back in my heels, reluctantly accepting the 5 meetings ahead, and looking forward to the next cup of mediocre coffee. While I am not in my ideal world I am far from hurting, and maybe the good news is Tegan and Sara will see me through the rest of my day and in the end, accepting my reality means I am free to fret about other things in my life.

No best selling novel.

No Patrick Dempsey-like doctor to romance.

But my mood's pretty good today, and it must be because I got my vitamin C, and damn if that doesn't make me lucky.

-H.

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 09:50 AM | Comments (17) | Add Comment
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