Stalking Run Amok

So I recently found an old friend's blog that was written so well and so full of genuine thoughtfulness that it inspired my own blogging. It turns out that my livejournal got a little too public...although I guess all blogs are public, this feels a bit more anonymous, since no one is subscribing to it. I am in need of real thinking, real pondering, doing something that really makes me question my values and status quo. I miss traveling. I miss meeting people different than me. I feel so stuck, just working a banal office job, barely paying the rent. When I got out of school, I was so sure of my specialness, so certain that I would find a job that really allowed me to shine like school did. Obviously, I'm still trying to find where my sparkle fits in to the world in a way that also provides health insurance. A little money to save for travel would be nice, too, but I don't want to get greedy here.

So here I am, here we all seem to be, for the first time our intellect means a lot less than charm, savvy, ugh, politics. I wonder if the spot of paint on my business suit has lost me a job yet. I'll never know. I won't be hired at any job where that type of thing will turn them off, mostly because I can't afford to buy myself another jacket. Beacon publishes so many books about the near-poor, the struggle of the middle class, and yet they pay their staff low-middle class salaries. They publish feminist books about how little women make compared to men, and yet they pay all the young women on the junior staff 10k less than most entry-level salaries in Boston. Really? I'm not saying they're sexist, I'm just saying that recognizing the social problems only goes halfway when it comes to solving them.

I guess that's part of the reason book publishing doesn't work for me. I've found that--even at Beacon--it just doesn't go far enough to make a difference in the world. Helping to physically create all these books just depresses me. Plus, as you might have noticed, my brain has become numb. I used to take care in the things I wrote, editing and rewriting with abandon. Now I treat everything like an email: quick, to the point, and a pain in the ass to have to do. I can't lose my ability to think and to write...if I do, what do I have left?