Monday, February 25, 2008

Driving my life away

As Carrie in Sex and the City, Sarah Jessica Parker used to sit on her bed and tap out her by-line on her trusty Mac every episode. Women all over the world wanted to be Carrie, never mind she looks somewhat like a horse in cooky clothes. She had great shoes, interesting boyfriends, and seemingly, a life. Her job was almost an afterthought. She wrote a book in between romancing Big, Mikhail Baryshnikov etc hanging out in cool bars with her cool friends dammit! Who knew you could do that?
Fortunately Carrie is a fictional character loosely based on the life of her creator Candace Bushnell and I content myself in knowing Ms Bushnell probably had to work at it a lot harder!

As much as I have spent half of my professional life churning out words, both as a writer and as a manager with hundreds of reports/memos etc I'm not half as lucky as Carrie. Sure, I own some great shoes but no where near the Manolos or Jimmy Choos and not a snowball's chance in hell of getting near them. But I don't let that bother me, after all, they're only shoes right. Right?

Nah, as I sit whiling away my life reading interminable reports, writing yet another useless communications plan that will be ignored or cleaning up the fall out from the ignored plan, I am warmed by the thought that my life has some meaning, some purpose to it. I'm not quite sure what right now but I'll get back to you on that. As I sit in traffic trying to get to the office every morning losing years off my life I know that my contribution to nation building will not go amiss, never mind that it takes me half an hour to travel three feet. Or else why would I do this? Unlike Carrie, mine is a higher calling, a mission if you will and I will not be deterred by the indifference, surly staff or bad customer service. I almost feel like Mel Gibson in Braveheart, FREEDOM from the tyranny of (insert name of organisation here), freedom for the workers......

Okay, you're forgiven for thinking that I lost my mind while watching the Oscars last night. You can attribute my above lapse to 1) the copious amounts of super spliff that my neighbours smoke under my bedroom windows, lack of sleep caused by said neighbours loud partying at 4:30 am three days in a row, the cumulative effect of carbon monoxide fumes from the traffic or the noise being made by the teenagers at the prestige school next to my office, so loud that they drown out anyone on the phone - did I really have a conversation if my lips were moving and no one could hear me?

So I think in the interest of maintaining some balance in my life, I will have to go visit Zappos.com. A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do ay.

2 comments:

GirlBlue said...

Shoes?
Zappos.com?

There was more to the post than that wasn't there? I know there was its just that you keep distracting me with talk of shoes

Coffeewallah said...

What can I say, I have a shoe thing. I think I need help. The expensive kind...actually, the kind that makes you buy more shoes. What can I say, I work for the Government.

See, that wasn't so hard to admit.

Yes it was.