It is so hard to be cooped up on the 24th floor of an office building when it is positively glorious outside. I don't wanaaaa work. Either it's the weekend and it's raining, or it is a weekday and I'm stuck inside and being teased by the view of all of the highrises being kissed by sunshine and the endless expanse of blue sky. I step out at lunchtime to girls strutting around in their summer best and men loosening the nooses around their necks to let a little air into their stuffed shirts. The smell of food cooking and the sound of women's slingbacks clickety clacking on the pavement and horns honking and people conversing...
On a rainy day it is all grayness shrouding everything and the wet black pavement and peoples heads bowed beneath black umbrellas and it's still loud, but there is a feeling of silence which comes over everything. But a good thing about it is that you don't feel the desire to be outside. Being inside is just fine when it is rainy and cold. It is the summer time that makes me stir crazy, each and every idle moment consumed by my relentless daydreaming about where I'd rather be than sitting at a desk attending to the bidding of others and being forced to overhear two crotchety old lawyers talk about where they bought their gaudy suspenders and cheesy bowties.
Kat and I were chatting recently and somehow we got onto the subject of "free time." She said "I don't really know what I consider to be 'free time'. I don't just think of any old time off as 'free time'." She said something else...something like "'Free time' is time to myself to do things just for me." I said "To me, free time is anytime when nobody is telling me what to do." Then I sat there and thought, wow, that pretty much sums up my personality in a nutshell. I just want freedom. That's all I have ever wanted from the moment I came into this world.
At the risk of sounding ungreatful for what I have (and knowing full well that things could be worse by volumes), I'll venture to say that I don't mean freedom like the kind I have, the freedom to get my ass out of bed in the morning and put on something presentable to wear and get on the crowded train and watch my precious youth slipping away while sitting in an office earning my paycheck so that I can pay my rent and my bills and dreaming of the things that I really want to do with my life. It's not that I don't want to work. I just want to have more of a choice about what I do without worrying about how much money it's going to bring in. And I don't want to have an ulcer when I hate everything in my closet in the morning and the train is experiencing delays. Egad that all sounds so petty when I think of it in perspective.
Don't get me wrong. There is nothing miserable about my job or my life in general and it is not even that I am unsatisfied. I just dream of other things, that's all. I feel the time slipping away, day after day, week after week, year after year....slipping away. Another day, another 8 hours earned. Another daydream. I wish I was one of those people who was happy not to leave a five block radius their entire life...but I'm not. I get restless and cagey and start indulging my imagination in unattainable fantasy.
Posted by Maria at June 24, 2003 11:13 AM | TrackBack